Sophia Bonnie Wodin

I have been asking myself a question lately, How do I make each moment sacred?   Can I take the internal space to savour this time, knowing that it will never come again?   How do I resist the urge to let the Now slip through my fingers as though I had all of the time in the world, as though I could return and do NOW all over again? For this NOW is truly all that we have.   This precious moment of sunlight on the snowy crotch of the catalpa; this smell of oatmeal simmering on the stove; this glance of a loved one from across the room; this ringing of the phone to ask the question, ‘are you keeping warm?’ this fleeting time.   How do we treasure what we have while it is here? This thing we name Time is so fleeting that we have convinced ourselves that we must keep pace with it, forgetting that we created Time to begin with.   The pace at which we live our lives is a bit like the tail wagging the dog.   We forget that taking a moment to stop, to rest...

Recently I was part of a conversation that focused on ‘how do we define the sacred? ‘  The conversation grew out of an essay by Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation called Listening to Natural Law . There were, as you can imagine, as many definitions of the ‘sacred’ as there were people to make them.   But we all seemed to agree that defining the sacred had to do with the relationship we make with the world, in this case the world of ‘natural law’. So, of course, we wondered about natural law and how to align with it.   The conversation filled the evening but the most interesting part for me were the thoughts I have been musing over ever since.   It turns out that the questions that interest me is not so much ‘what is sacred’ but ‘how do we remember who we are?’  And then, ‘how do we hone our awareness to stay present with all that life offers?’.  For that, I suspect is the path towards ‘making sacred’ all that our ...

Quite a few years ago I was offered the opportunity to complete the sentence, “I am so imperfect I…..”   At the time, the mother of two in their early teen years, my response was something like “I even allow my children to drink Coca Cola!”.   It was the most horrific thing I could imagine and it yielded satisfying gasps around the assembled circle.   Thinking back I have to chuckle. But, taken more seriously thinking about our imperfections is a pivotal question.   Perhaps our imperfections shine a light to point out the direction of our learning?   To borrow from Leonard Cohen, “there is a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in”?   Perhaps our imperfections are the cracks; those pieces of our history or parts of ourselves that we might wish we could erase that actually point out our path towards our healing. Like Kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold, our imperfections make us more beautiful that any flawless ma...

I have added a new practice to my life or perhaps returned to an old practice.   The practice of loving kindness – towards myself.   I frequently counsel others to treat themselves more tenderly. Finally I realized that I was really talking to myself. Do you ever get that sense that the things you say to others are actually what you need to hear?   Well that’s how it turned out for me this time.   That ‘mantle of tenderness’ I was suggesting to so many others, I needed to don it myself.   Here’s how it went.   I have many frames for my daily practices; sitting meditation; a daily writing practice, currently fiction; exercise, generally some version of yoga or, in warmer weather a walk.   At times I have thought, what a luxury it is to give myself all of this time every day devoted just to soothing and being me.   But truth be told, it’s not really a luxury.   For me it’s a necessity. Like all of us, sometimes I don’t ‘do my pract...