Now We Pause at the Balance Point

Ancient spiritual traditions of the world encourage the practitioner to pause at the balance point of the breath ~ the still point between breaths. Current science affirms that the nervous system takes a minute rest at the end of each breath, resetting our whole system toward calm abiding.  We do not need to look far to discover who has taught us this lesson.  We and all of creation, from our most primordial ancestors to the scientist in the lab, practice “biomimicry” with each breath: all breathing-beings imitate our Earth Mother.  Now, after her long exhalation of summer’s beauty, bounty and beneficence, she is beginning to prepare for winter’s sleep.  As with our breath, we can elongate this still point.  Let’s pause now, to experience the balance point.

Equinox

Celestial geometry

maps star voyages

that navigate cosmic seas.

One beam of earth’s star

rays out low across land,

glances off stones

standing at sunset.

Now a telluric ritual begins

            October Lady’s Tresses

            ~floral spears~

            point to summer’s

final hours.

Lobelia wears a violet crown:

medicine for breath

and dreams.

Frost grapes and porcelain berries

shine plump, heavy,

tempt autumn’s fox.

Witness earth’s weight shift

as she moves toward quiet,

toward her fragrant rite

            laying down

            layering up

mounded, umber

            oak and poplar leaves

            bee balm flower stalks

            beds of bracken.

This is her ceremony of soil;

magic at its most potent.

Winter’s death is a chrysalis

returning to its

embryonic state.

Fluid with possibility

~ pluripotent ~

earth turns toward sleep.

From my book of earth poems, A Litany of Wild Graces ~ Meditations on Sacred Ecology

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Photo Johannes Plenio

Jewel Weed Wears Her Diamond Studded Gown

 Let us Walk Redemption

Now we set this foot

upon holy soil,

now this one

upon star moss,

now sand beside

the sacred stream,

now the tenderness of

sweet Jewel Weed.

Let us walk our prayers,

walk at the center of

time and space,

as feet press prayers

into fragrant autumn loam.

 The first wild plant I fell in love with when I moved to Virginia was Jewel Weed! Her medicinal properties are full of kindness and generosity: her gel-like sap breaks down poison ivy’s itchy oils; her fresh juice cools and calms mosquito bites; her fungal properties help athlete’s foot and ringworm.

Plant people say that if you make a relationship with a wild plant, or if you need its medicine, it will come to live close by. Here you see this year’s Jewel Weed, just outside my kitchen door.  The hummingbirds, making their autumn journey south, are congregated here with me.  We are all buzzing and humming in gratitude. My feet press prayers into fragrant autumn loam.

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Breathe with Our Living Earth

Prana

***

Mother to earth’s water cycle

breath is an airborne ocean

moving through

tissue, muscle, blood.

The human is made new

at each in-breath;

our scent, note, hue

are given away

at each out-breath.

We become a river bed:

our minerals, bones, stones

sculpt the shape of water.

***

Let us breathe with the earth

 invite earth inside our body:

the coyote by night

at stream’s confluence

gnawing bones,

catching crayfish

children come by day

splashing, giggling

stream ripples glisten

in sunlight

owl calls to her mate

in the pine scented breeze,

we listen motionless.

***

Our mind, prayer, heart

flow out on the breath.

 Earth and human are

twined as lovers;

each one’s embrace

subtly shapes and

molds the other,

our rhythms rising

and falling in tandem.

From my book of earth poems, A Litany of Wild Graces ~ Meditations on Sacred Ecology

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Photo by Christian Lunde

To Re-Sanctify Earth

 The Glory of the Ordinary

Fifty years ago I had a dream in which I was given a new spiritual name and new spiritual practice.  They were both called by the same name, in a language I did not know.  I asked a native speaker to translate and awoke with the words The Glory of the Ordinary ringing…singing… in the cells of my body. In her visionary book The Glorians, Terry Tempest Williams re-sanctifies Earth, rewriting a sacred text, Psalm ninety-one, beginning in this way:

“Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Holy Ordinary will rest in the shadow of the Glorians.  We will say of the Glorians they are our sanctuaries and our fortresses, they are our wonders in whom we trust.”

A visitation from the Glory of the Ordinary arrived outside my door recently; it is a wonder in whom I trust.  This is my sacred Psalm:

Animalia

I.

She hears a small thud

against the window.

Sparrow huddles,

breath coming fast,

blinks as the woman

bends to hold her.

No flutter of wings

quieter still

inside the basket.

The woman pulls

soft flannel close,

steps back inside.

II.

Forest animals

she bows to by day

return to her

under moonlight.

They inhabit her dreams:

She holds a wedding

bouquet of living snakes.

Bees deposit honey

into her lap.

Birdsong becomes

elixir in a crystal vial.

A stag with diamond antlers

stands in shallow creek water.

Her house of dreams

is a living bestiary

herds, packs, flocks, schools

species, times, seasons, eons

are waves on the sea

rising, merging, rearranging

patterns of furred, finned

feathered bodies

surfacing and receding

III.

When humans stood to walk

face forward, gaze level

the underside

~ belly, womb, heart ~

were exposed

vulnerable for the first time.

Rolling over

wolves submit

with a lowered head

tail tucked

underbelly soft and visible.

The woman rounds

her body, bends low

forehead on the ground

to bow bare

before the Sacred.

IV.

One sparrow

the weight of feathers

and a heartbeat

launches into flight

from a basket rim.

From my book of earth poems, A Litany of Wild Graces ~ Meditations on Sacred Ecology

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Photo by Michael Heng

To Reimagine Language

Listen for meaning and mood

as wind rustles dry grass

and mice rattle seed-heads.

Understand the beat of wings;

dawn geese rise

from mist-laden pond.

Mind

listening to coyote song

and owl speech

will sprout

softly velvet new antlers

or become

a chambered nautilus.

Now land will sculpt mind

as water carves

sandstone canyons.

Know the way out

is the way in:

retrace recent steps

return to

where-we-went-wrong

make reparations

so our words

our stories

can return to

the great conversation

among elements

and beings.

Together as one

we will sing the world alive.

Again.

From my book of earth poems, A Litany of Wild Graces ~ Meditations on Sacred Ecology

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Photo by Rex Boggs

To Reimagine Liturgy

Gaia’s own liturgy offers the possibility that we be released from the binding structures of the Western mind.  A new liturgy and its rituals can blur the edges of our sense of self and open the door to unitary states: unite the boundlessness of Spirit with the eternally cycling here and now.

Gaian liturgy is sacramental:  outward and visible realities express the subtle movements of Spirit.  The unfurling of an emerald fiddlehead fern announces the sacred miracle of Spirit’s seed.  It unfolds not only in the green world, but also in the sacrament of our own bodies. The tangible and finite make Spirit visible. 

A sensate liturgy offers us a communal lens through which to witness truth.  With spoken rhythms and gestures, scriptures and texts, prayer’s call and response, the human community is woven together for a sacred moment outside of time into one body, one heart, one mind.  We become one living expression of praise, in communion with all beings.  The resonant states created by a participatory liturgy lift us out of isolation, unbind us from the narrow confines of solitary thought.  We become embedded in something greater than ourselves, a pervasive joyous intelligence.

In these invocations we return to a liturgy of the incarnate deity.  Let us gather friends and family, and together experience these healing, unitive states.  Let them be written into our bloodstream, carried in the rhythm of our footsteps.  Let us walk this ecstatic unity into the moments of our daily lives.

From my book of poems to the Earth, A Litany of Wild Graces

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The Holy Ordinary

 You must read Terry Tempest Williams new book “The Glorians.”  The Glorians are not distant deities, but the ordinary often overlooked presences ~ animals, plants, landforms, rivers ~ that reveal our shared vulnerability and interconnectedness with the green earth.  What they teach us about the power of attending to beauty as an act of resistance as well as an affirmation of hope, is immense.  Open your eyes to the Glorians around you.  And I will share with you some of mine.

Ceremony, Gift-giving, Prayer

In the green light of

Appalachian forests

other-than-human

nations convene for

ceremony, pageantry

gift-giving

prayer.

Proud mullein push

new velvet leaves

through leaf litter,

wear petal crowns.

 Wild grapevine

bows down

to touch sacred earth.

 Forest raspberry canes

are lavender flags

carried in late afternoon light.

Troupes of

translucent Indian Pipe

are ceremonial

ghost dancers.

A republic of

tubers, seeds, mushrooms

arrive from far away tribes

bringing gifts

to give away.

As bees bring sweet medicine

for all.

From my book of Earth-Poems

A Litany of Wild Graces

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Summer Bouquet, Summer Dreams

Night Breath

In nuanced darkness

the spherical nature of sound

echoes in cochlear spirals.

Cicada’s song resonates

with red fox’s shrill bark

and moonlit breezes.

Through tapestried shadows

the breath repeats Huuuu...

heart beating its rhythm.

This breath, created by

tulip poplars and spice bush,

we share with

red-winged blackbirds

who feed their fledgling

one sunflower seed by one

orcas breaching and

shimmering in sunlight

as they play off Vashon Island

a bob cat whose shriek

punctuates pungent dark.

It is a layered elixir infused with

the exhaled dreams of boundless

furred and feathered ancestors

since the first chloroplast

invited mitochondria to dance

a tango of symbiosis.

Each breath, a stratified

sedimentation of beings

~ a fertile broth ~

 drifts damp and lush

through bedroom windows.

From  A Litany of Wild Graces, my book of love poems to Earth.

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Your Child and Nature Have Been Waiting for Each Other!

Join me and the Organization of Nature Evolutionaries in our latest collaboration:

Children’s Adventure: Kinship with Nature

Five lessons of story, song, and elemental adventure for children and their adults.

Watch a child with a puddle. Or a stick. Or a roly-poly discovered under a stone. They don’t need to be taught wonder. They already carry it.

What they need is time. Presence.

And an adult who will slow down and look with them, make up stories, lie in the grass, and say: this world is alive, and you belong to it. Children’s Adventure: Kinship with Nature gives you the structure, the ideas, and the activities to make that happen — a little goes a long way.

WHAT’S INSIDE THE COURSE

Five lessons, each built around one of the great elements of life: Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether. Each lesson includes:

• Sharifa bringing circle time to life — story, song, and movement for your child

• Song lyrics to print and sing along together

• The story source, with a link to order the book

• Practical activities: outdoor play, crafts, foraging, art, and more

• A curated picture book list

• Suggestions for making a Sacred Space and Gratitude Bundles together

The course also includes:

• A guide to outdoor movement and child development

• Natural bug solutions, so fear of critters doesn’t keep you from the green world

• A curated fairy tale list with age-appropriate guidance

• Personal reflections on Nature connection for children with disabilities

Designed with a sliding scale, every child who loves to roll in the grass and listen to crickets can join Children’s Adventure: Kinship with Nature

I hope you will meet us there, in the green arms of the living Earth!

Stay in Touch and invite a friend:

Wild Graces website Rewilding Substack Instagram

Rewilding the Human Heart wins Nautilus Award

Rewilding the Human Heart is a celebration of new and ancient ways to honor our earth-ancestors and deepen these primal relationships. As we dive into the cardinal elements of Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Ether, as well as nature’s realms ~ Minerals, Plants, Animals, Humans and Unseen Beings ~ we also rekindle their wild and essential nature within our own being. In this way we become better relatives to our fellow earthlings.  

 Chapter by chapter we become immersed in the components of our luminous biosphere. We deepen our felt experience of the elements and invite the realms of nature into closer relationship. Because we are composed of these very elements and realms, we will discover how their qualities, moods, gifts and challenges exist within our luminous inner sphere. We will deepen into relationship with these earth-ancestors on many levels, within our body, heart, soul, mind, and spirit. Their wildness will rekindle our own wild and tender wisdom.  (From the Introduction)

Web

 In forest light,

mind’s kaleidoscope slows.

Movement germinates anew,

arising now from her feet

that step through leaf litter.

Solomon’s Seal waves

from a green ocean’s

distant reef.

At her feet agrimony bows;

hand to heart, she bends.

Silken veils

invisibly spun across her path

reach out and cling to her,

as spiders come and greet.

Wrapped in webs she walks,

Spider Grandmother by her side.

Together they comb and spin Unity,

weaving life’s complexity

from the singularity of One.

A sole ray of light

pierces summer’s canopy,

refracts off a silk thread

riding across her eyelashes.

It is an arrow of light

flying into the future

showing her the way.

Prose is from Rewilding the Human Heart

Poetry is from A Litany of Wild Graces

When I’m not in the woods, find me here:

 Wild Graces website:

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Join Me in The Rose Garden this summer!

I hope you will join me and LifeWays in this new summer course

“In The Rose Garden with Sharifa”

If you work with young children in any way, this course if for you! Whether you teach in a school or a home program and are needing fresh insights; if you are a parent and wanting to bring your children joyful activities in a calm and inspiring way; if you are an au pair and looking for ways to organize your day, this course will offer you a wealth of tips and suggestions that will enrich your relationship with the children you care for.  This is from the LifeWays website:

“In this course Sharifa Oppenheimer takes you “behind the scenes” of her many years in the Waldorf classroom.  Perhaps you have had the experience of walking into a Waldorf Early Childhood classroom and watching the teachers glide gracefully from task to task, like swans across a lake.  But if you look below the water’s surface, which we will do in this class, you can see the swans’ feet are paddling quickly and powerfully.” 

Together we will explore all the experiences of a typical Waldorf day with young children.. You’ll learn the small tips that bring Waldorf’s lofty principles right down into the nitty-gritty of classroom life: how to streamline bread-baking, how to bring the children artistic and home life activities in a beautiful and efficient way, how to organize cleanup time so it seems like a waltz, how to entice and hold the children’s attention in circle and story time, how to anchor creative play time, what to do about childhood arguments, how to enrich your playground with loose parts and much, much more!  

These simple, grounded tips and suggestions are meant to be a springboard for your own ideas and creativity. This work will help you manifest in your own classroom the spiritual principles that are the foundation of our work.  In these ways, you create Heaven on Earth.”

I’d love for you to join me in this wonderful adventure! 

Please click here to explore more details, and to register.

I hope to see you in this Zoom course soon.

More places to find me:

Wild Graces website:

Rewilding Substack

Beauty Is Medicine

Spring is arriving and receding day by day.  The family of deer, our woodland neighbors, have found ways to stay warm and find food through the long weeks of icebound forestland.  They laze in the sunlit meadow.  Sometimes frolicking in the warmth, sometimes grazing the new greens.  Wild bees buzz lazily, the squirrel comes quickly as I lay almonds in a row on the deck railing.  Summer birds have begun to return and spring’s azure butterflies have reappeared at the creek. 

Beauty is ephemeral and cyclic: permeating the days, present to each moment. Beauty is medicine to heal the ugliness in the headlines. Small acts of beauty defy the soul-deadening paradigm, the algorithms that chain us to despair.

Animalia

I.

She hears a small thud

against the window.

Sparrow huddles,

breath coming fast,

blinks as the woman

bends to hold her.

No flutter of wings

quieter still

inside the basket.

The woman pulls

soft flannel close

steps back inside.

II.

Forest animals

she bows to by day

return to her

under moonlight. 

They inhabit her dreams

            She holds a wedding

            bouquet of living snakes

            Bees deposit honey

            into her lap

            Birdsong becomes

            elixir in a crystal vial

            A stag with diamond antlers

            stands in shallow creek water

Her house of dreams

is a living bestiary

herds, packs, flocks, schools

            species, times, seasons, eons

are waves on the sea

rising, merging, rearranging

patterns of furred, finned

 feathered bodies

surfacing and receding

III.

When humans stood to walk

face forward, gaze level

the underside

~ belly, womb, heart ~

were exposed

vulnerable for the first time.

Rolling over

wolves submit

with a lowered head

tail tucked

underbelly soft and visible.

The woman rounds

her body, bends low

forehead on the ground

to bow bare

before the Sacred.

IV.

One sparrow

the weight of feathers

and a heartbeat

launches into flight

from a basket rim.

From my book of poems A Litany of Wild Graces

Forward Wild Graces to a friend: There they’ll find 

Nesting Circles of Belonging ~ Family, Nature and Cosmos.

Subscribe for free to my SubStack!  Rewilding the Human Heart

Visit me on Instagram

 Photo by  Idean Azad

We Learned to Sing from Our Feathered Ancestors

“The nightingale dips the truth into honey

and makes this into song”

Thirteenth Century Sheikh Tapduk Emre

Sing

Wood thrush flutes

amid dogwood flowers.

Sings reality to me,

veils it in aeolian cadences.

She and I

inhabit this green cloister,

our lives spent singing

among supple poplars.

Appalachian winds move

among their branches,

intoning grace and praise.

Chanting her spiral remembrance,

she is a Sufi clothed in simple brown.

I become dust at her delicate

crimson feet.

We take flight together;

sacred breath

inhabits my bones,

hollowed by the knife

of human limitations.

She, with bones made of air,

I with bones carved by grace,

our melody resonates in

the heart of the world.

From my book A Litany of Wild Graces

Please share with friends:

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https://www.sharifaoppenheimer.org

There you’ll find Nesting Circles of Belonging

 ~ Family, Nature and Cosmos ~

 Photo by Matheus Protzen

Singing is Our First Language

Over the millennia humans have learned tangible ways of fostering relationship with each other and the more-than-human world.  Our lives were spent observing the myriad ways plants, insects, birds, and other animals communicate. The gifts of song, movement, breath and blessing are lessons humans have learned from our other-than-human kin. I call these ways of communication technologies of relationship. We employ these technologies ~ these embodied languages ~ within our deepening kinship with nature.

Song is earth’s first language, articulated by wind in treetops; by water rushing over stones and dropping into clear pools; by birdsong at dawn, autumn crickets, geese flying in formation; by coyote whom we call the song dog and vixen’s song of love. Like our ancient ancestors around the fire at the cave’s edge, we too can discover the magic of song as we embed ourselves more deeply into our own immediate pocket of the emerald earth. As we walk our favorite trail or sit in the twilit back yard, allow song to arise from your listening heart.  Offer this simple song as a gift to these other-than-human relatives who surround you.

Sing now! Seeds are wakening below and springtime birds are beginning to return.  The pre-spring-time blessings of Imbolc are rustling underground and winging our way.  Our songs of gratitude can help pull the warmth and growth of springtime closer.

Soon, in this blog, we will call on the miracles of Movement and Breath to deepen our relationship with our fellow Earthlings!

Excerpted from my book Rewilding the Human Heart ~ A Journey of Reunion.

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https://www.sharifaoppenheimer.org

There, along with you, they’ll find Nesting Circles of Belonging ~ Family, Nature and Cosmos.

Photo by  Doncoombez 

The Heralds of Spring

Bare winter branches

bow to frigid winds.

Chimes chant prayers.

Summer’s hydrangea stalks

rattle sun-drenched thoughts

that skitter past frozen ferns.

 Cardinals are scarlet sentinels

on dogwood’s silver branches

etched into winter’s brocade.

Yet, at the foot of wintry poplars

 snow drops feel the call

of coming solar warmth.

 Let’s celebrate new and ancient rituals to honor the rhythmic cycles of earth and our fellow earthlings.  As we dive into the cardinal elements of Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Ether, as well as nature’s realms ~ Minerals, Plants, Animals, Humans and Unseen Beings ~ we also rekindle their wild and essential nature within our own being. In this way we deepen these primal relationships.

Join me and LifeWays for a deep dive into Kinship with Nature is a Family Affair.  In this video is your personal invitation; I’d love to take this journey with you!  

Photo by Kate Knott