Sophia Bonnie Wodin

  Settle in Into the Darkness The Blessed Darkness from which We came            All                   Life                            Begins                                     In Darkness   Breathe          Wait                   Wonder     What comes next?          Don’t know     Here in the Darkness The great fertile Darkness… ...

  The sun breaks through the morning mist, the air sparkles. The world awakens.   We remember: the air is fine; the mist is fine; the earth is fine. They are each true to who they are.     We humans walk through our days surrounded in The Beauty. How, in the face of loss, can my aching heart embrace The Beauty, The Beauty that is here…..   The Beauty lies in our determination to preserve the treasure of Love;   The Beauty surrounds us as we hold each other, even when we watch our dreams crumble into ashes;   The Beauty is our determination, to walk our path together even when, especially when, the Way has been lined with disappointment.  The Beauty hold us in strength and in love.   The Beauty picks up the pieces and finds new ways to fit them together until the jagged edges of an unfair reality reassemble whole and new.   The hoped-for story shattered, The Beauty rests in resilience.   The Beauty puts one foot in front of the othe...

In that formless place that continually forms and dissolves and reforms, a candle burns. Thus, the magics remain. The candle burns. The magics keep the spheres aligned in their paths. They remain strong. Remain malleable. Remain true.  But look, as we watch, the candle sputters. The Good Red Road twists and turns. The ribbon that has rolled out for countless generations of Life shrinks to a narrow ribbon.  Is it doubling back on itself?  Perception in the fragile light is fraught. It echoes throughout the realms. Lying in the balance, the Fae Ones look to their human allies. Could they open their eyes, their hearts? Would they? Is change possible? The Queen of the Fae straightens Her back. She throws back her head and spreads wide Her arms. She speaks the Words and sends them out to waiting ears.   The Word goes out: “Heed you well, O you beings of The Realms! Change is upon us! Hold your heads high, your feet purposeful as you approach the Crossroads. Here, now the ...

To our children and our children’s children  for ages to come and back through time…..   We come into this life fresh and new. We look around us in wonder. How can it be that this marvel of a world exists? And here we are, living in it. Nay, we rise up from within it; for truly, we are a piece of this miracle.   And so we walk through our days.   Some of our days are sun filled, a joyous dance to life. But all too often our days are confusing. We forget who we are, where we are graced to be living.  We forget where we have come from, where we are going.   We forget that we have companions. We might think we are alone, separate, trudging along a road that has grown dark and dreary.   Perhaps today your pathway is rutted. Littered with rocks; bisected by roots.  Perhaps brambles reach out, seemingly intent on grabbing at your shirt, your hair, scratching your cheek, leaving you scratched and bleeding. Just a little … or maybe a lot.   It was to...

  Harvest season is here! As we settle into the shorter days here in the Northern Hemisphere we gather the fruits of our labors from the long summer days. Perhaps you have a garden, perhaps not. Perhaps you grow some of your own food, perhaps not. Perhaps you grow beauty, perhaps not.   But whether or not you engage with Earth during the growing season, still there are harvests. At this time of the year, we look at our all of our harvests: the harvests from our gardens, the harvest of our lives.    We may wonder, is this harvest ‘enough’? Will it get me through? Am I ‘enough’? Can I become the fulcrum through which my life can maintain its every-changing balance in order to know  I Am Enough ?   We are like Pamela ‘Pixie’ Coleman Smith’s rendition of the Two of Pentacles in the Smith-Waite Tarot (a.k.a. Universal Tarot or Rider-Waite Tarot), juggling to keep our lives in balance, to keep our balls in the air or in our hands.  The dominant paradigm cond...

  #1   Tumbling over boulders We merge  and separate, and merge once again.   Rising and                     falling   Spiraling      Inwards   Stretching   o  u  t  w  a  r  d  s     Drawn  ever  onwards.   The swirling vortex                                       beckons         # 2 In a moment the heart lifts.   Awareness…   and Water  and Fire  and Air align with Earth.               The Cauldron of Mystery                          ...

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war spreading, families dying, the world in danger, I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover. - Wendell Berry -   At the beginning of many of the trainings I offer, I ask some version of the question:  What do you bring?   I hope to get answers like: a questioning mind; an open heart; an adventurous spirit; resilience; my yearning inner child; my questing young adult; and the like. I ask because I am interested in how we recognize ourselves as resources. Through our days and years we have gathered vast and diverse experience. All too frequently we don ’ t recognize the value that these experiences offer. And we forget to honour them. Yet we are resources and the best resource for our own lives.   The responses I get are frequently something along the lines of: I am a teacher/parent/office worker/student, etc. You get the picture. We are used to responding with one or more of the roles that we carry ...

Sometimes our lives are pretty. Other times they bring us to our knees. It is in how we rise, get our feet back under us that opens the portal to Beauty. The outcome is never known as we travel our path. But we walk and keep on walking. In the end there’s not much else to do. Walking tall is Beauty. 

One morning in early spring, some friends and I walked along the river on one of our favorite walks. On the way back we turned away from the river to explore the uphill side of a flood plain* and plunged more deeply into the forest. The woods here were thick with both mature and young trees; some upright others tilted crazily, an outcome of wind and seasonal rains. The trees were so thick that even though they had not yet leafed out we could barely see the houses at the crest of the hill beyond. It was idyllic. Then I looked down. There was this plant newly emerging from the thawing earth. It covered the forest floor. It looked oh so familiar. As we walked along, I noticed that this plant was everywhere. Then, with a sinking heart I recognized it. Gout Weed, Bishop’s Weed, Ground Elder (Aegopodium podagraria)**. Whatever you call it, once it has entered your life you will work long and hard to extricate it. And, ultimately, you will fail. You will have to keep after it year by year. I...

As the days on Earth lengthen and turn towards spring, we find Queen Persephone in the Underworld with her lover, King Hades. She tends to the souls of those who wait for life to call upon them once again.   But even in this timeless place, time passes.  And Mystery has its way with us all. In this place of sameness the unexpected happens. A whiff of air drifts in and mingles with the mists and vapors of the Underworld. The sconces and torches flutter and quickly regain their steady glow.     A murmur arises among the Shades, “from whence comes this breeze?” A sadness of memory flutters through rushing from shadow to shadow until it is dampened amidst the fog and the vapors. But that freshness finds its way to Persephone. The Queen raises her head and sniffs.   “What is this? An aroma of newness? Here among the Dead there is no newness. All remains. All remains. No change comes to this place. All remains.”   Nonetheless, curiosity, a scampering child of Tim...

I was raised in a household in which Kindness was not a value. I had to learn it as an adult. That is not to say that there weren’t  other noble values in my childhood home, but Kindness wasn ' t prime among them.   It was when I found the poem  Kindness  by Naomi Shihab Nye that my journey towards Kindness actually began.   I don ’ t remember how or when I found the poem or who pointed it out to me. What I do know is that it stuck. It was similar to the time in the late 1970 ’ s when I was sitting regularly at Insight Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts. At the end of my 10 minutes meeting with the teacher, I made the statement,  “ This word  compassion , you use it a lot. I don ’ t think I know what it means.” The teacher just smiled. Although I didn’t recognize it at the time, finding the poem Kindness was a step along the path towards finding out.   When I found that poem, or when it found me, I was living in a ramshackle owner-built ho...