“Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.”
“Sense the deep resonance of your longing. Invite Great Spirit’s longing to ground you in what you are being called to transform in life.”
These opening lines of a recent, world-wide meditation dropped me levels deep into meditation while strolling through the woods at Prairiewoods one evening at dusk.
“Longing is the transfiguration of aloneness,” pens poet David Whyte, “the defenseless interior core of a person receiving its overdue invitation from the moon, the stars, the night horizon and the great tidal flows of life and love” (Consolations, 135).
All of creation invites, awakens, illumines the collective longings of the world. Explore your longings as you rest in visio divina—“sacred seeing”—with these images. Allow your heart and imagination to enter these sacred spaces. Rest in silence. Sense the invitation of your own longing for transformation.
“Longing is divine discontent, the unendurable present finding a physical doorway to awe and discovery … Longing is … the foundational instinct that we are here essentially to risk ourselves in the world, that we are a form of invitation to others and to other-ness, that we are meant to hazard ourselves for the right thing, for the right woman or the right man, for a son or a daughter, for the right work or for a gift given against all odds” (David Whyte, Consolations, 136).
As I left the woods in the cool of the evening, there she was! The Spirit of Longing—Mother Earth, feminine divine, courageous Mary … call her whatever you choose! There she was grounded in the heart of a tree—see her? Hear her? Amazing Longing!
—Ann Jackson, PBVM, Prairiewoods spiritual services coordinator