It's is pre-dawn and the light in my bedroom is dim and placid. The house is quiet and my computer hums warm on my lap. In this moment, this space, even in my messy room, feels sacred, holy, set apart from the buzz of the everyday. Don't you just love it when that happens?

In my heart I hold a memory. It Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and a glorious new Autumn season. Friends have gathered in our home to perform the tashlich, an ancient ceremony in which one casts stones into a body of water to symbolize the removal of misdeeds and regrets from our bodies and souls. It is a gesture which says, "a new season has come, a new beginning, and we are ready to let go."

"The world of activism, can be rigidly secular. It felt to me like coming out of the closet when I began talking about spiritual practice with my activist friends"--Marisa Handler

"September. My mother always says it's like getting shot out of a cannon. No matter how long you were in school or how long you've been out, whether you have school-aged kids or no kids, September is undeniably intense. Poignant. Change is in the air, and I'm not just referring to my candidate of choice."

In a previous post, Spirituality, Religion and Activism: What's the Connection?, I mentioned the work of the Seasons Fund for Social Transformation. The Fund supports organizations that are using "inner work" to inform their activism. 

In a western commercialized society, is there any part of the spiritual path that is more difficult to practice than simplicity? The noisy-ness of our world can make it incredibly difficult to find a place where you can live with less, quite your monkey mind, and leave a smaller footprint on our good, earthy Mother. That's why I'm so thankful for my sister bloggers out there who keep on keeping on with the quest for simplicity, and offer their experience as assistance for the journey.

This week I would like to introduce you to Suzie Ridler, the beautiful muse who caught the idea of Dreamboarding and cast it out into the world.

"No matter how many projects and campaigns and initiatives and alliances we set in motion, we won't find fundamental solutions to societal ills until we learn how to approach this work with greater awareness, compassion, and humility." - Seasons Fund for Social Transformation

The world is on fire. This is always the case. There are forever wars and rumors of war, famine and strife, brother turning against brother -- and sometimes all of them happen at once. This week, with the floods, and the fires, and the political upheavals, my heart has been heavy. I've wanted alternately to act and to hide, to write checks and to dive under the blankets. But the blankets are no place for revolution, and if you don't at least carry the water you have been given, the flames will never dissolve.

At Stonhenge on Solstice the sun crested over softly arching hills, struck the blue-hued Heelstone, and drove its light between the arches of the great trilithon. Hundreds were there in dreadlocks and druid robes, smelling of travel and patchouli, trying to name something unnamable, making it up as they go along. Isn’t that what we all do? Cobble something together from shards of history and intuitive pull? Look for the meeting point between what we know and what we hope to be true?

There are lines of poetry so powerful, so soul shaping that one must carry them in one's memory -- or at the very least post them on the corkboard in the kitchen; or tuck them into the little clips holding up the bathroom mirror so everyday the poet can console or confront you while you clean your morning-and-night teeth.These poems are what I have come to think of of as "plainsight poetry," that is, verses which must be kept at easy access. The one I most need now is this:

Poets were my first priests, and poetry itself my first altar. -Mary KarrSince the Enlightenment Era we've been very busy pursuing knowledge--and correspondingly with arguing over which group has cornered the market on getting-it-right. Now that we've moved into a post-enlightenment, post-modern millennium, many of us are realizing that facts are slippery creatures. Suddenly our perspectives shift and we see that what is true for you is so very often not true for me...or the other way around...or both things in the same breath-taking moment.