🌗 May Last Quarter Links
"The Tao of Heaven is without favorites / Yet always joins with the good" — Tao Te Ching 🌗
Make Sacred Space begins Sunday! These four evenings will offer soulful time for creation and contemplation. Every Sunday in May, 7–8:15 pm ET. Enter your week soulfully... Registration and more info here.
Hi friends
Holy. Moly. This world. These kids. 🫶🏾
I hope you’re finding sacred connections to your own tender heart. I’ve been dipping back into this intentionally poetic version of the Tao Te Ching and was struck by this verse from Poem 43:
The world’s most tender thing
Surpasses the world’s hardest thing
What has no existence enters where no space is
From this we know that in not acting we gain
A wordless teaching
An effortless increase
Few in the world realize this
In her translation, Rosemarie Anderson describes how the Tao Te Ching’s central message of wei wu wei (“act without acting”) is rooted in intuition. She emphasizes that the “not acting” of wei wu wei does not mean doing nothing, but acting from the effortlessly spontaneous but unfathomably deep creative power of Tao. Here’s Poem 8 (and her commentary below it):
The highest good is like water
Bringing goodness to all things without struggle
In seeking low places spurned by others
The Tao resembles water.
Relevant to the situation, our actions may be swift or slow, but they will in time resolve all obstacles at their source in the same way that water carves out canyons and moves mountains. What matters most will vary for each of us. This is wei wu wei in action. In imitating the Tao, we too may accomplish the impossible.
May we be the few who realize. May we move like water. May we flow toward freedom.
This month’s Last Quarter Links are below. Thanks for being here.
With love,
Sebene
P.S. 10% of May paid subscriptions will go to Heal Palestine’s fund to build a new NICU in Rafah. Thank you for your support.
Thank you for all your replies to my newsletters. I appreciate and read all your emails. Unfortunately, I can no longer keep up with responding to them. BUT, I do read and acknowledge all comments.
🌗 Last Quarter List 🌗
“They threaten the power structure — that's why they're under attack.”
Fighting has started again in Tigray. And hungry children are forced to help feed the starving.
For those versed in astrologese, this is a fascinating analysis of the 8th house of both the U.S. and Israeli charts (with an intro about Costa Rica’s to start).
“We hear with our ears, we listen with our mind, and we deep listen with our whole body.” — from “Listening” is a tender act with listening scholar, Amelia Hruby.
This looks ah-mazing: Creating Joy in Community Through the Practice of Gratitude & Equanimity: A Retreat for Trans, Gender Nonconforming, Genderqueer, Non-binary and All Gender Expansive Communities
My friend Jeff gifted me the novel A Stranger In Olondria by Sofia Samatar, a Somali-Swiss American writer who wrote this vividly fantastical tale while living in South Sudan. My friend Peter and I recently joked about taking a deep breath of dread when a novel begins with a map of made-up lands, thinking “Oh brother, am I going to be able to follow all the weird place names and endless categories of otherworldly beings?” (ditto a similar fear of complex family trees at the start). But this book drew me in with its gorgeous writing and the just-different-enough world building. She draws on that uniquely East African combination of Middle Eastern, African and South Asian flavors, scents and sounds to create a rich and riveting story about longing and grief, power and love. Thank you Jeff!
I want to take a course on writers’ diaries.
I keep forgetting to share my recent podcast appearances:
Creative rhythms and going towards the love on Hurry Slowly with my friend Jocelyn K. Glei
Attuning on the Point of Relation Podcast with the lovely and open-hearted Thomas Hubl
Sharing about “Intuitive Knowing” with Jeff and the incomparable (Lama/Amazon/Genius) Tasha Schumann on the Mind Bod Adventure Pod. I am absolutely thrilled to let you know Tasha will be joining Jeff, Dan and me for Meditation Party, May 17–19. 🥳 She’ll be bringing her skills as a teacher and DJ to our Saturday night dance party. There’s still space to register. [My dear friend Aaron DRM will be joining us for the fall party.]
Speaking of meditation parties… How to Handle Literally Anything on the Ten Percent Happier Podcast
On Sunday, Lin and I went on a reconnaissance mission for an (intermediate) BIPOC hike we’re planning for the fall. I’ll also be offering some accessible outdoor opportunities for all in Brooklyn this summer. Stay tuned! And here are some ideas you can check out in the meantime.
Image ID: Summit selfie of Lin and me with Hudson river and valley behind “Revolution begins with the self, in the self. The individual, the basic revolutionary unit, must be purged of poison and lies that assault the ego and threaten the heart, that hazard the next larger unit—the couple or pair, that jeopardize the still larger unit—the family or cell, that put the entire movement in peril. We make many false starts because we have been programmed to depend on white models or white interpretations of non-white models, so we don’t even ask the correct questions, much less begin to move in the correct direction. Perhaps we need to face the terrifying and overwhelming possibility that there are no models, that we shall have to create from scratch.” — Toni Cade Bambara, “On the Issue of Roles”
From Parable by Nikole Brown:
If this is a parable you don’t understand,
then, dear human, stop listening for words.
Listen instead for mane, wind, wings,
wind, mane, wings, wings, wings.
The lesson here is of the mare
and of the insects, even of the rooster
puffed and strutting past. Because now,
now there is only one thing worth hearing,
and it is the plea of every living being in that field
we call ours, is the two-word commandment
trilling from the trees: let live, let live, let live.
Can you hear it? Please, they say. Please.
Let us live.
Make Sacred Space:
Enchanting Time for Meditation • Intuition • Creation
A Soulful Start to Your Week * 30 minutes of guided meditation * 10 minutes of journaling prompts * 30 minutes of open space for dreaming & doing :: Four Sundays in May, 7–8:15 pm EST
Many of us long to bring more sacredness into our lives. But we rarely make space to do so. Come spend four Sundays cultivating enchanted time for contemplation and creativity.
THIS month, I’ll be back at Omega Institute with my friends Jeff & Dan (with special guest Tasha Shumann!) for Meditation Party.
Or join me in June for The Greatest Love of All with the dream team: Dawn, Kate and La. And in October I will be back for an encore with Dan & Jeff (and special guest Aaron DRM). Scholarships are available for all three programs.
Appreciate all these thoughtful links and wish I lived closer for the med party. Have fun! 🙏
this is all really helpful. thank you 💗