An Invitation to Grandmother Time

This truth can only be found in one’s own life, right in the center of the present. I feel a new freshness in my life because somehow, this truth that the conditions are always perfect for awakening feels like it’s rooted deeper in. Like I can’t shake it anymore. And what that does to my life is makes it almost unbearably gorgeous.

I’m wondering if you who are pregnant, you who have tried for the last two and a half years to conceive, you who have just dropped off your child at school, you who are holding your child still nursing, you who feel like your parenting is not what you want it to be, like your relationship is not what you want it to be, will come and sit with me at my house. I wonder if you will let me infuse you with the mysterious grace of my current confidence in this moment and all it can offer us. I wonder if you will come to my house and eat the food I have made for you, for its beauty, and to fill your body with the body of earth called food.

I wonder if you will wonder with me, if you will ask your grandmother self for the wisdom you need, no other wisdom, not wisdom from me, not wisdom from anyone else on planet earth, yet this wisdom will inevitably be from the entire earth body. Will you ask for help with me, can we ask together, in silence, in writing, in praying, in sitting and chatting and eating together, and see what happens?

This is what life is offering me to offer. I want us to bring every singe doubt, and lamentation, and confusion, and every single facet of our lives that feel like they are getting in the way. I want us to bring these questions to the altar we make together, an altar called inquiry. And I want us to see what it offers us to look at them on an altar. What it reveals about their perfection.

When we imagine (until we know) that every condition of our lives is perfect for awakening, then what our action is changes. Our action shifts from what do I need to try to control or optimize, to, what do I need to listen for, to give thanks for, to laugh about, to offer to life in reciprocity for so many riches?

I want to feed you, and I want to give you a foot bath in a copper bowl, and I want to give you delicious tea, and I want you to be brave enough to receive it, to be willing to be so audacious to imagine you deserve it for no reason other than you are a human of this earth. I want to offer you words also called a guided meditation for the purpose of awe alone, awe at our riches, remembering our riches together.

Being equally grateful for the riches and the times we can’t remember we have even one rich.

Will you join me? Will you complete our circle?! Oh I do hope so!

It’s so easy to spend an entire lifetime waiting for the conditions to improve, even just slightly. The purpose of this retreat is to come together and notice our lives while inside them, to not miss our lives and especially our children.