The Spacious and the Sacred

It's spring and in episodes 117-120 we are talking about hope. What is it? How do we talk about this intangible thing? Can it be toxic? We don't have the answers, but we lean into the conversation.  Gathering Word: “Hope” is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson “Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all - And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard - And sore must be the storm - That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm - I’ve heard it in the chillest land - And on the strangest Sea - Yet - never - in Extremity, It asked a crumb - of me. ______________ Andi Chatburn: https://www.andichatburn.net/ Audre Rickard: https://www.saturatedgrace.com Heather Fignar: http://www.heatherfignar.com Irene Dunlop: https://www.tendsoulcare.com  If you need support during this season, please reach out to a friend or call a crisis hotline: dial 988

It's spring and in episodes 117-120 we are talking about hope. What is it? How do we talk about this intangible thing? Can it be toxic? We don't have the answers, but we lean into the conversation.  Gathering Word: “Hope” is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson “Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all - And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard - And sore must be the storm - That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm - I’ve heard it in the chillest land - And on the strangest Sea - Yet - never - in Extremity, It asked a crumb - of me. ______________ Andi Chatburn: https://www.andichatburn.net/ Audre Rickard: https://www.saturatedgrace.com Heather Fignar: http://www.heatherfignar.com Irene Dunlop: https://www.tendsoulcare.com  If you need support during this season, please reach out to a friend or call a crisis hotline: dial 988

Episodes 113-116 move us from fall to winter at winter solstice. How do we hold onto hope in a dark season? How do we actively wait in the long dark night? Gathering Word Excerpt from It Will be Okay by Lysa TerKeurst One morning, the Farmer came into the shed, as He had on many days. “Little Seed,” He said as He placed him in His hand, “I have a wonderful plan for you. I have waited for just the right time, and today is the day!” Oh no, please no! I don’t want to go!thought Little Seed. The Farmer went outside and knelt down. He pushed Little Seed under the ground, into the dirt, and down to a deep, dark, messy place. “Now, Little Seed, this is going to be different and it might seem scary, but it will be okay. You can trust Me,” said the Farmer. Little Seed wished he were inside the cozy packet on the rickety shelf in the Farmer’s dusty shed. “I want to trust, even when I can’t see. But how in the world is this good for me?” “Little Seed, come back!” cried Little Fox when he saw the Farmer take his friend away. “Where are you, Little Seed?” He looked in the front of the shed and behind the shed, but . . .Little Seed was not there. He looked on top of the tractor and under the tractor, but . . .Little Seed was not there either. He looked in the horse’s stall, the pig’s pen, and even in the Farmer’s boot, but . . .Little Seed was not there either. Now Little Fox was really worried. “Little Seed?”he shouted “I’m here, I’m here,way down in the dirt. I’m scared and I’m lonely, but I’m not hurt,” came Little Seed’s muffled voice right below him. Now Little Fox was really worried. “Little Seed?”he shouted.” Little Fox thought hard for something to say or something to do that would help his friend not be scared. But he was afraid too. “It’s different and scary to be someplace new . . . but it will be okay, Little Seed.” Little Seed was not so sure. And neither was Little Fox. But the Farmer was good, and the Farmer was kind, and the Farmer was always watching over them.Even when they didn’t know it.” ______________ Andi Chatburn: https://www.andichatburn.net/ Audre Rickard: https://www.saturatedgrace.com Heather Fignar: http://www.heatherfignar.com Irene Dunlop: https://www.tendsoulcare.com  If you need support during this season, please reach out to a friend or call a crisis hotline: dial 988

Episodes 113-116 move us from fall to winter at winter solstice. How do we hold onto hope in a dark season? How do we actively wait in the long dark night? Gathering Word by Alexander John Shaia Christmas falls at the darkest moment of the year. It is also the very moment when the light is once again made visible to the naked eye. The deepest dark is not the place where grace goes to die. The deepest dark is where grace goes to be reborn. ______________ Andi Chatburn: https://www.andichatburn.net/ Audre Rickard: https://www.saturatedgrace.com Heather Fignar: http://www.heatherfignar.com Irene Dunlop: https://www.tendsoulcare.com  If you need support during this season, please reach out to a friend or call a crisis hotline: dial 988

Episodes 113-116 move us from fall to winter at winter solstice. What happens when the winds shift and the days darken?  Gathering Word: Sweet Darkness Written by David Whyte When your eyes are tired the world is tired also. When your vision has gone, no part of the world can find you. Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own. There you can be sure you are not beyond love. The dark will be your home tonight. The night will give you a horizon further than you can see. You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you. ______________ Andi Chatburn: https://www.andichatburn.net/ Audre Rickard: https://www.saturatedgrace.com Heather Fignar: http://www.heatherfignar.com Irene Dunlop: https://www.tendsoulcare.com  If you need support during this season, please reach out to a friend or call a crisis hotline: dial 988

Episodes 113-116 move us from fall to winter at winter solstice. What happens when the winds shift and the days darken?  Gathering Word: A Liturgy for those who feel distant from God by Heidi Johnston Every Moment Holy Volume III I recall with longing days when the waters parted at your command and you carried me, featherlike, into your presence; when your lovingkindness was the whisper that revived my weary soul; when your presence was the pillar that marked my path by day, and your voice the flame that banished darkness and kindled my song in the night. Oh God, my God, Where is your comfort now? If in this season of loneliness your silence simply offers me a chance to do what will never be asked of me again in all of eternity to come; to trust without sight, believing that time will  vindicate my hope and prove you ever constant, then give me the courage to stand, trusting that these lines I throw out are not cast into emptiness but, passing through the veil, have taken hold of  Things eternal. Give me boldness now, even as doubt crouches at my door, that I may choose to anchor my heart not in the ebb and flow of feelings But in what I know to be true. ______________ Andi Chatburn: https://www.andichatburn.net/ Audre Rickard: https://www.saturatedgrace.com Heather Fignar: http://www.heatherfignar.com Irene Dunlop: https://www.tendsoulcare.com  If you need support during this season, please reach out to a friend or call a crisis hotline: dial 988

Episodes 109-112 move us from summer to fall. In this episode we discuss the letting go and a grandmother's kazoo band. Gathering word: The Consequences of Death by Pattiann Rodgers from Firekeeper: Selected Poems (2005) Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis.  You might previously have thought Each death just a single loss. But when a plain gray titmouse dies,  What plunges simultaneously and disappears too Are all the oak-juniper woodlands,  The streamside cottonwoods, every elderberry Bush and high spring growth of sprouted Oak once held inside its eye.   And when a sugar pine splits, breaks to the ground, falling with its fiestas and commemorations of blue-green needles,  long-winged seeds, the sweet resin  of its heartwood, there’s another collapse coincident - a fast inward sinking and sucking back to nothing of all those stars once kept in its core,  those clusters of suns and shining  dusts once resident in the sky of its rigid bark and cone-scales. We could hear the sound of the galactic collapse as well, if we had the proper ears for it.   And when a mountain sheep stumbles,  plummets, catapulting skull, spine,  from cliffside to crumbling rock below,  a like shape of flame and intensidy on a similar sharp ledge on the other side  of the same moment, out of our sense,  loses balance, goes blind.    Because of these torn paper-shreds  of gold-lashed wings, this spangled fritillary’s death, somewhere behind the night a convinced declaration of air and matter a and intention, silenced, speaks no longer of the god of its structure.   ______________ Andi Chatburn: https://www.andichatburn.net/ Audre Rickard: https://www.saturatedgrace.com Heather Fignar: http://www.heatherfignar.com Irene Dunlop: https://www.tendsoulcare.com    Rewilding Retreat on Dec 21, 2023 https://www.andichatburn.net/retreatmt/p/wild-winter-solstice-dec-22-23-2023

Episodes 109-112 move us from summer to fall. In this episode, we contemplate what it means to store up glimmers as sustenance for our future selves. Gathering word a poem by Heather Fingar What if we celebrated the smaller? The way we hoot and holler When tinies learn to high five Blow kisses, carry their dishes A blue hydrangea flower boon Under the dying blooms unpruned Avocados perfectly ripe August rain, a lessening of pain Yesterday me who thought ahead Making today me easily fed Hatch chiles stuffed and grilled Spicy goodness, small gifts fill us. Chimes below ring with the breeze and I feel myself sink into ease How would the practice change us to celebrate the smaller, hoot and holler? -copyright 2023. Heather Fignar  ______________ Andi Chatburn: https://www.andichatburn.net/ Audre Rickard: https://www.saturatedgrace.com Heather Fignar: http://www.heatherfignar.com Irene Dunlop: https://www.tendsoulcare.com    Rewilding Retreat on Dec 21, 2023 https://www.andichatburn.net/retreatmt/p/wild-winter-solstice-dec-22-23-2023

Episodes 109-112 move us from summer to fall. In this episode we discuss gratitude for Harvest even when it's messy. Gathering word by Morgan Harper Nichols You are allowed to have Gratitude for the present And Hope for the future  at the same time   ______________ Andi Chatburn: https://www.andichatburn.net/ Audre Rickard: https://www.saturatedgrace.com Heather Fignar: http://www.heatherfignar.com Irene Dunlop: https://www.tendsoulcare.com    Rewilding Retreat on Dec 21, 2023 https://www.andichatburn.net/retreatmt/p/wild-winter-solstice-dec-22-23-2023

Episodes 109-112 move us from summer to fall. In this episode we discuss out favorite summer moments - including a cold plunge in a glacial creek. Gathering word is a portion of  Taste and See by Puno Selesho Taste and see. You have loved me in my quiet, danced with me in my wild. You take pleasure in my smile and you decorate my braids with flowers of praise.   Filled with wisdom, but even when I do not heed your wise call, you do not mock me as my feet trip and fall, but instead you look upon me with a longing and a love. And you say ‘Thalita cumi’, get up little girl, arise my love. Let’s try again, go right, and further on turn left, a lamp unto my feet, guiding every step.   Taste and see the goodness in this space We can neither touch you nor describe you but we feel you. You are not merely a sixth sense but a potent presence with a fragrant potpourri of grace, I beg you. In every room I enter: sprinkle your petals all over the place. Fill it. Mend it. Restore it.   Taste and see it and feel it. Taste and see and feel it. Let it move to your fingertips ever so slowly, wrapping itself around you. Let it creep up to your smile, tugging at each stubborn corner. Open up wide. Joy!   May the coldest, most awkward hugs become momentary havens. A transfer of love.  Taste and see Taste and see Taste and see and feel That the Holy Spirit exists.   ______________ Andi Chatburn: https://www.andichatburn.net/ Audre Rickard: https://www.saturatedgrace.com Heather Fignar: http://www.heatherfignar.com Irene Dunlop: https://www.tendsoulcare.com    Puno Selesho: https://www.punoselesho.com/ 

Episodes 105-108 Moving from Spring to Summer in these 4 episodes.  Gathering Word: Threshold by Maggie Smith You want a door you can be             on both sides of at once.                          You want to be            on both sides of here   and there, now and then,             together and—(what                          did we call the life             we would wish back?   The old life? The before?)             alone. But any open                          space may be             a threshold, an arch   of entering and leaving.             Crossing a field, wading                          through nothing             but timothy grass,   imagine yourself passing from             and into. Passing through                          doorway after             doorway after doorway.   ______________ Andi Chatburn: https://www.andichatburn.net/ Audre Rickard: https://www.saturatedgrace.com Heather Fignar: http://www.heatherfignar.com Irene Dunlop: https://www.tendsoulcare.com     

Episodes 105-108 Moving from Spring to Summer in these 4 episodes.    Gathering Word: The Gift of Strawberries Excerpt from “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer In a way, I was raised by strawberries, fields of them. Not to exclude the maples, hemlocks, white pines, goldenrod, asters, violets, and mosses of upstate New York, but it was the wild strawberries, beneath dewy leaves on an almost-summer morning, who gave me my sense of the world, my place in it. You could smell ripe strawberries before you saw them, the fragrance mingling with the smell of sun on clamp ground. It was the smell of June, the last clay of school, when we were set free, and the Strawberry Moon. I'd lie on my stomach in my favorite patches, watching the berries grow sweeter and bigger under the leaves. Each tiny wild berry was scarcely bigger than a raindrop, dimpled with seeds under the cap of leaves. From that vantage point I could pick only the reddest of the red, leaving the pink ones for tomorrow. Even now, after more than fifty Strawberry Moons, finding a patch of wild strawberries still touches me with a sensation of surprise, a feeling of unworthiness and gratitude for the generosity and kindness that comes with an unexpected gift all wrapped in red and green. "Really? For me? Oh, you shouldn't have." After fifty years they still raise the question of how to respond to their generosity. Sometimes it feels like a silly question with a very simple answer: eat them. Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. ______________ Andi Chatburn: https://www.andichatburn.net/ Audre Rickard: https://www.saturatedgrace.com Heather Fignar: http://www.heatherfignar.com Irene Dunlop: https://www.tendsoulcare.com 

Episodes 105-108 Moving from Spring to summer in these 4 episodes.  Gathering Word: The Journey By Mary Oliver One day you finally knew What you had to do, and began, Though the voices around you Kept shouting Their bad advice‚ Though the whole house Began to tremble And you felt the old tug At your ankles. “Mend my life!” Each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do, Though the wind pried With its stiff fingers At the very foundations‚ Though their melancholy Was terrible. It was already late Enough, and a wild night, And the road full of fallen Branches and stones. But little by little, As you left their voices behind, The stars began to burn Through the sheets of clouds, And there was a new voice, Which you slowly Recognized as your own, That kept you company As you strode deeper and deeper Into the world, Determined to do The only thing you could do‚ Determined to save The only life you could save. ‘The Journey,’ from Dream Work by Mary Oliver. © 1986 Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc Andi Chatburn: https://www.andichatburn.net/ Audre Rickard: https://www.saturatedgrace.com Heather Fignar: http://www.heatherfignar.com Irene Dunlop: https://www.tendsoulcare.com 

Episodes 105-108 Moving from Spring to summer in these 4 episodes.  Gathering Word -Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen, page 247 "When jarred into feeling how precious life is and how swiftly time moves through us, we are overcome with an urgency not to waste another second. Now we feel the need to speed up and rush, grabbing what we can in fear that the fire of being alive will bring down the house. What we do next is a turning point in our lives. While such urgency is understandable, it is only by slowing down that time drops its movement. Only when opening everything – our urgency, our worry, our fear, our regret - are we welcomed into the timeless pool of being. After all we go through, we are asked to lead a life of honest expression, which always starts with listening as a way to remember what matters, to name what matters, and to voice what matters. These are the practices that keep us authentic."   Andi Chatburn: https://www.andichatburn.net/ Audre Rickard: https://www.saturatedgrace.com Heather Fignar: http://www.heatherfignar.com Irene Dunlop: https://www.tendsoulcare.com 

Episodes 101-104 On the spring equinox we talk about the transition from Winter to Spring. Gathering Word - Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May "We must emerge slowly from our wintering. We must test the air and be ready to shrink back into safety when blasted by unseasonal winds; we must gradually unfurl our new leaves.  There will still be the debris of a long, disordered season. These are the moments when we have to find the most grace: when we come to atone for the worst ravages of our conduct in darker times, when we have to tell truths that we'd rather ignore.  Sometimes we will have to name our personal winters, and the words will feel barbed in our throats: grief, rejection, depression, illness. Shame, failure, despair. It often seems easier to stay in winter, burrowed down into our hibernation nests, away from the glare of the sun.  But we are brave, and the new world awaits us, gleaming and green, alive with the beat of wings. And besides, we have a kind of gospel to tell now, and a duty to share it. We, who have wintered, have learned some things. We sing it out like birds. We let our voices fill the air."  p141, Wintering by Katherine May   Greening Retreat led by Andi Chatburn and Irene Dunlop: https://www.andichatburn.net/retreatmt/p/june2023    Andi Chatburn: https://www.andichatburn.net/ Audre Rickard: https://www.saturatedgrace.com Heather Fignar: http://www.heatherfignar.com Irene Dunlop: https://www.tendsoulcare.com 

Episodes 101-104 On the spring equinox, we talk about the transition from Winter to Spring Gathering Word - For a New Beginning by John O’Donohue In out-of-the-way places of the heart, Where your thoughts never think to wander, This beginning has been quietly forming, Waiting until you were ready to emerge. For a long time it has watched your desire, Feeling the emptiness growing inside you, Noticing how you willed yourself on, Still unable to leave what you had outgrown. It watched you play with the seduction of safety And the gray promises that sameness whispered, Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent, Wondered would you always live like this. Then the delight, when your courage kindled, And out you stepped onto new ground, Your eyes young again with energy and dream, A path of plenitude opening before you. Though your destination is not yet clear You can trust the promise of this opening; Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning That is at one with your life's desire. Awaken your spirit to adventure; Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk; Soon you will be home in a new rhythm, For your soul senses the world that awaits you.   Andi Chatburn: https://www.andichatburn.net/ Audre Rickard: https://www.saturatedgrace.com Heather Fignar: http://www.heatherfignar.com Irene Dunlop: https://www.tendsoulcare.com

Episodes 101-104 On the spring equinox we talk about the transition from Winter to Spring  Gathering Word - Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur love will come and when love comes love will hold you love will call your name and you will melt sometimes though love will hurt you but love will never mean to love will play no games cause love knows life has been hard enough already p60, Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur   Andi Chatburn: https://www.andichatburn.net/ Audre Rickard: https://www.saturatedgrace.com Heather Fignar: http://www.heatherfignar.com Irene Dunlop: https://www.tendsoulcare.com

Episodes 101-104 On the spring equinox we talk about the transition from Winter to Spring  Gathering Word - Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May "Everybody winters at one time or another; some winter over and over again. Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness or a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you're in a period of transition and have temporarily fallen between two worlds. ... However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful." p13, Wintering by Katherine May Andi Chatburn: https://www.andichatburn.net/ Audre Rickard: https://www.saturatedgrace.com Heather Fignar: http://www.heatherfignar.com Irene Dunlop: https://www.tendsoulcare.com