A Word for 2015



Some who love birds are called birders,
so are ones who love words known as worders?

(Just wondering--b)

I'm happy to be a member of a small covenant group.  We've each decided to choose a special word of her own to carry throughout 2015, and to share it with the rest of us.  

I've been brain-storming, stacking words up in my journal. They each present me with meaning and challenges, but I'm looking for one that resonates deeply with my life right now.  And that's rather hard to pinpoint--I ought to know it when I hear it, right?

It needs to maintain its relevance all year, and also be a word that draws me forward, because I definitely plan to progress on my spiritual journey.
 

Yahweh, please guide me through life and, when I pause in dark places, remind me that your will is not done in a state of stagnation nor of fear.

Lately I've heard and read on blogs about others who use this focus-word practice, and prefer it over making resolutions.  One of my sisters, doing this for the first time, has chosen "mindful." A friend's daughter chose "dare."  I love hearing the words, why they've been selected, and how they'll be used during the year. 

Anyway, I may have found my word now.  I've studied it awhile through a "prism" of sorts, allowing the facets of prayer and contemplation to reveal its many colors. It seems to be a good word for me, but  rather than share it now, I think I'll hold it, wear it, and live it a day or two. Then I'll let you know.
 

The Little Haiku that Couldn't...and then Could

 

On a totally different note about words, I don't think it's a rare thing for people to  occasionally awaken with prophetic or poetic words firmly planted in their minds, words begging to be part of something.  One morning last week, the phrase "warm shoulders of earth" was in my head when I woke up. It seem like great bones for the beginning of a haiku, so I grabbed a scrap of paper off my bedside table, and scribbled and tweaked syllables till it was done. I thought it was pretty, but a bit too vague (as in "what's she talking about?).  

As I carried my little scrap from upstairs bedroom to downstairs office, I stopped along the way to make coffee, find something to munch on, and attend to various other distractions.  Yes, I lost my haiku. I never saw it again, and suspect that I accidentally tucked it into the pile of newspapers headed to the recycle bins down the street. My temporary frustration over this small loss was pretty silly, considering the mediocrity of the poem. I only needed to sit down and write a better haiku!

Still inspired by the words I woke with, here's the better haiku along with a photo of our backyard river.

 

 

river never sleeps

within earth's warm embrace

her soft breath rises

B

p.s. I just realized there is a moral for me in this story.  No, it's nothing to do with senior moments, or disorganization, or even about poetry. The moral for me is that when God sends inspiration through dreams, words, nature, and people of all sorts--it's not always the sight, literal word, or person that is his message. Many times it's just the invisible inspiration itself, to be breathed in and then used to his glory in some way.

 

The Drama of the Atacama






In October of 2006 I traveled to northern Chile on a mission trip. My friend Ann was living there for a year, serving in mission through the United Methodist Church. She was based in the coastal city of Iquique, on the edge of the Atacama Desert, and had set up a project for us at the Insituto Agricola Kusayapu, located in Pachica. She took our small team to the school to live and work for a week. We traveled in a large van by way of one of the most perilous roads I've had the excitement of traveling.

 

The desert is vast, and said to have never received rainfall in some areas. It's like no other place I've ever been. I've spent most of my life within a day's drive of the verdant Rocky Mountains with their 12,000-14,000-foot peaks of stone and snow. I lived a short while in southwest New Mexico, and am well-acquainted with the vibrance of the Tucson, Arizona deserts. But the Atacama? I was awestruck by this desert's monochromatic, rounded mountains of dirt and copper. Rocks and boulders lie about. Some stones are stacked into cairns, standing alone miles beyond any other sign of civilization.   

I loved the other-worldliness of it, even (perhaps especially) in the dark night when starlight makes its soil glow like the moon. When I came back to Kansas, it began to sink in that I had sensed something sacred in the Atacama. 

 

And now, so very far away from it, I'm still moved by that feeling when I think about it just being there, unseen by most of the world. I can't touch it, or hear it, or see it except in my memory, imagination, and in my growing knowledge of the Creator.  

 

I simply can't explain how the Atacama has affected me. It's as though I've seen a long-ago earth in the making, bare yet revealing the handprint and heartbeat of God for any who seek to know Him. As though forever waiting, it lies silent beneath glowing stars and blazing sun. The desert is so fertile it would surely bloom into a profusion of flowers and food, an Eden, were rains to bless it.  Meanwhile, its soil carries the bones of ancient and modern people, as well as the tracks of those living good yet hard lives. 

 

 

 





A woman walks along the desert road--photo by BonnieB

 

 

An Incredibly Dark and Sacred Hour

I lie on bare earth that is the Atacama.

With God we are moving, Atacama and I, unheard and unseen.

No wisps of grass nor leafy trees grow here to rustle in the breeze.

It’s four a.m.

I stare into a moonless sky draped in sorrow-less black.

No grief can exist amid so many stars!

I long for, belong to, the mystery above.

A brilliance beyond starlight beckons soulkind to soar;

This soul, my soul, joyfully responds.

Surely I’m floating, detached from the world.

I am one with the Source and with all of creation

in this hour long before the desert sun rises--

when the heavens will have shifted

and a dozen satellites will have silently slid by.

Bonnie Hamilton Beuning 

©March 9, 2013