from Elisabeth On Earth’s Reflection Deck….

My narration of this poem:

I Cannot Name You

therefore you must live and we must marry

—

the one who read the poem to me is dead.....

(although the one who gave him to me is living--and gave him to me again and again intentionally--and i can not name him because he hides in many guises but is always recognizable)...........

and didn't even read it to me..but to the world...

even though it felt like it was just for me.

and i was seeking him

though he never sought me

because he didn't even know me.

and i have felt traces of him in everyone.......

I am not falling into that trap

of talking about myself as home..

i am talking here about a union

one person with whom to share my life. ....

we were not made to be islands

free the bird from captivity

what i want is simple.

must my end be so total?

and if my end is so total

may my beginning

also be so totally full of joy?

Home

With Love, Writing With Water (also known as Kelly Verret) ✨💛✨ 🙏🏻♥️🌹♥️🙏🏻

Dear Readers,

As this platform has grown, its core mission has always been to analyze complex systems, champion intellectual integrity, and foster a truly global community of independent thought through my poetry and writings. Today, I want to step back from our usual content to address a broader, structural challenge that many independent creators face in the modern digital and legal landscape: the critical intersection of digital security, due process, and the protection of professional work.

The Modern Threat to Independent Intellectual Property

For independent writers and independent professionals, our intellectual property is our livelihood. In an era of centralized digital networks, independent platforms face unique vulnerabilities. Technical file sabotage, unauthorized access, and systemic data disruptions are no longer abstract concerns—they are active strategies used to isolate independent voices and suppress professional output.

When a writer’s proprietary files or professional timelines are compromised, it disrupts more than just a publication schedule; it directly impacts their earning capacity and structural independence. True professional security requires rigorous local hardware isolation, encrypted communications, and an absolute boundary between one’s private work and public networks.

Due Process and Systemic Hurdles

Navigating these challenges often brings independent creators into contact with complex legal frameworks. Across many jurisdictions, self-represented individuals face severe systemic hurdles when attempting to protect their rights. Administrative maneuvers, rapid scheduling tracks, and opaque procedural guidelines can sometimes be utilized to bypass traditional discovery rules, keeping a litigant blind to the very tracks moving beneath them.

True justice relies on the enforcement of mandatory disclosure and strict adherence to constitutional due process. When administrative systems are leveraged without a verified, document-backed evidentiary basis, it compromises the structural integrity of the entire proceeding. Identifying these institutional gaps is a vital step toward protecting individual liberties.

A Brief Operational Update and Request for Referrals

On a personal note, I am currently navigating a complex, highly contested legal matter that has temporarily impacted my routine and restricted my ability to publish full-time. I have successfully established my formal legal baselines, secured my physical paper trails, and am methodically organizing my structural portfolio to address these systemic due process and data privacy issues.

Because this matter involves multi-jurisdictional elements and specialized administrative tracks, I am seeking to expand my legal team outside of local circles to ensure absolute neutrality and top-tier expertise.

A Request to My International Network:
If you belong to or have a direct connection with high-level, out-of-state federal trial firms, civil rights litigators, or national whistleblower protection boutiques (particularly based in New York or Massachusetts), I am actively seeking credible professional referrals. I require counsel with extensive experience handling complex professional liability, data privacy, and systemic due process violations.

How to Connect Safely:
To protect the integrity of this process, please do not leave specific referral names, links, or details in the public comments section below. Instead, if you have a direct, professional recommendation, please contact me privately through my direct messaging on substack and I will provide you with designated offline professional channels so we can initiate a secure conflict check.

Thank you all for your continuous solidarity, your sharp insights, and your unwavering support of this platform. This community remains a vital space for independent thought, and I look forward to returning to my regular poetry and literary postings.

Warm regards,
Kelly Verret Pen Name: Writing With Water

It was during this Spring Semester that I experienced a miscarraige. I was 47. I will never forget the kindness of my professor Francine Cardman, who took me by the hand and gave me the kind of support I was not receiving at home.

This is what I looked like then. I grow wistful when I see her, knowing what she was going through, what she tried so hard to walk through in a way that could keep everyone in her family alive and intact.

Thousand Hands Lyrics:

“As long as you are kind and there is love in your heart A thousand hands will naturally come to your aid As long as you are kind and there is love in your heart You will reach out with a thousand hands to help others”

Samsara(2011)set to Bonnie Jo Hunt, Michael Stearns, Ron Sunsinger -

With Love, Writing With Water 💧 —Kelly Verret

From “Cloth for the Cradle” by the Iona Wild Goose Group set to image and song by me in 2016 for a class I was giving.

My narration of the below poem:

✨

It doesn’t have to be Advent to allow the love you are to arrive for someone who is crying out.

You don’t even have to believe there is a God.

to make yourself fully present

to the suffering,

your own and that of others

You ARE love right down to your toes

It is YOU who can choose to arrive fully for someone right now

and be what this poem is calling for

Sometimes actions without words are the most powerful ways to say

“I hear you. I see you. I feel that and I am not looking away.”

You can say it with your eyes, with what you choose to do next, with your listening.

Really, there are more than a million ways.

And to give your love to someone who is suffering is a GIFT to all the suffering

including YOU

Christmas was meant to be reborn into the world every moment of your life

✨

With Love, Writing With Water

can you find the heart in the above image?

This is a project I did for a class in 2012 as I studied for my MDiv. It still stands.

Found video (2012) of a seed becoming an oak tree.

Excerpt from a paper I wrote in 2012 on God, Empathy and the Care of the Suffering:

While there are endless biblical references to God’s empathic activity in the world, God revealed empathy as God’s modus operandi most definitively in the person, suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus. As Denis Edwards says, Christianity can not offer a definitive answer to why pain, suffering and death occur, yet in our witness to the death and resurrection of Christ, we can say that “…divine love is revealed as unthinkable compassion. The cross reveals a God who enters into the pain of the world, who suffers with suffering creation (Edwards, 106),” In other words, in the perfect union of God and humanity in Christ in which the two natures retain their distinctness, God enters into and unites God’s self with human life, pain, and suffering, understanding and feeling it from our point of view, while still remaining God (See Carl Roger’s definition of empathy on p.2). In doing so, God does not take away Christ’s pain and agony on the Cross, nor does God blot out human kind for its capacity to violate the dignity of humanity, what has happened remains unalterably real, but God enters into it and in this action, the suffering and death of Jesus is transformed into new life. This is important because in our culture (and particularly in the medical world), we tend to deny the full breadth of human suffering. We try to run away from it as a reality, or to make it go away, and in our attempt not to look upon it, or our desire to tame it, we deny those who are suffering the dignity of their authentic experience of it, and impede their need to tell about it in their attempts to integrate it into the story of their lives (or worse, we blame them for it) and this causes them even greater harm (Frank, ). This is not to say that medicine does not play a vital and important role in the healing of injury and illness. When we can relieve pain and help the physical body regain integrity and wholeness, this should be done, as the good Samaritan cared for the physical needs of the man on the road side (). But, we must not reduce a person into body parts and chemical reactions by denying or ignoring their experience of suffering and healing, its shifting meanings for them, and the full dignity and freedom of their personhood (Frank, ). Humans are made in the image of God and we are hardwired with a capacity for empathy ( ). A chaplain stands fully present at the foot of the cross of Christ and does not look away, but receives Christ fully as God and human by hearing, understanding, and ratifying his cry from the viewpoint of the person lying in the sick bed. This is empathy.

Likewise, when we take the time to be fully present to our own experiencing of life and our care of others, we become aware of an “observer self” (that is our most whole self) who stands before the reality of our own suffering or joy as an inner felt-sense of the whole way we are experiencing ourselves and God in our caring for others without over identifying with any one part. In this way of being present to ourselves, welcoming, and accepting what really exists within us without trying to change it, we begin to experience a transformation and integration of the parts of us in an ongoing process towards wholeness (shalom) [class notes]. I attribute that transformation to the work of the Holy Spirit…. It never forces change, and yet it is the stuff of grace because it comes as a pure gift, and its transformative capacity is the stuff of resurrection, the ongoing process of the creation of a new world within us out of the chaos and turbulence created by events that impact and interrupt our old ways of being. When we do not attend to our inner experiencing of life, and when we deny parts of ourselves that we do not like, we jeopardize our ability to be fully present to others as chaplains and pastoral care-givers because “we cannot give what we do not have to give” ( ). As Gene Gendlin states: “What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it any worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it (Gendlin, ).” When we can acknowledge what is true within our own experiencing and accept and welcome our broken parts we move towards the congruence that Carl Rogers says is necessary for a therapist to have in order to effectively be an empathetic presence to another person (Rogers, ).

The power of empathy to play a healing factor in the life of a person experiencing illness or injury

Illness and injury are unbidden visitors that inescapably and inevitably make appearances into each human life: sometimes suddenly and sometimes gradually, sometimes, as in the case of chronic illness and disability, to make a more permanent home with us and sometimes to stay only for a brief time. But regardless of how they come and how long they stay, these visitors interrupt our lives and have the capacity to transform the ways we experience and make meaning of the world, God, others, and ourselves (Frank, ;). The experiences of illness and injury remind us that we are, after all, “body-selves”, that through our bodies that we experience and interact with everything (Frank, ). These bodies we are consigned to can break, we cannot always control them, and they do not necessarily break at times when we have adequate resources to draw from or when we are experiencing our most “adult” self. Illness and injury interrupt the plans we had for ourselves and can even make us look differently at past events and the meanings we give to them. They thrust us into a disorienting medical world that has a language and a philosophy of life that may be very different from our own. Suddenly we are immersed in a noisy, busy, intrusive world that makes dizzying demands upon us: to sift through often conflicting advice about which we must make quick decisions when we feel exhausted and are wracked by pain, to be compliant with procedures and treatments that invade us and sometimes hurt more than the illness itself, and to change or give up aspects of our lifestyle that once gave us a great sense of mastery, comfort, or purpose and connectedness (Frank, ). How an illness or injury will affect and transform a person’s sense of self, world and others will depend upon the seriousness and/or permanence of the injury or illness and the way the person interprets and interacts with it from their own unique perspective governed by their self concept, unique history, and belief systems. For example, how have they previously viewed their relationship with their bodies?

As Arthur Frank asks, “do I have a body or am I a body?” Through illness and injury, we may become more aware of our vulnerability, our fragility, and our smallness (and so do others), aware that we are less capable or even incapable of performing daily tasks that once came so easily, and aware of our dependency upon the kindness, competence, and actions of those who care for us and walk with us in our journey. Friends and family may treat us differently and even abandon us out of fear or discomfort with the changes they see in us. Some people may even blame us for our troubles.

Suddenly we may find ourselves surrounded by self appointed and well meaning “experts” who have all sorts of advice we neither wished for nor asked for and question us about the most intimate details of our lives. (my words)

The world of a person who has become seriously ill or has sustained a serious injury and that of their families, friends, and caregivers is a kaleidoscopic world of transition. (my words)

It is not unlike the watery chaos described in the first words uttered in Scripture: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters”(Genesis 1:1). I have chosen this passage because it is the story of new birth and every change in our lives, bidden or unbidden, involves the birth of something new. It is also a story that reminds us we are not alone in this inchoate, shifting mystery we call life. The Holy One accompanies us in the depths of our being and in the empathic care and witness of those around us.

Thank you for visiting here. With love, Writing With Water —- Kelly Verret ✨💛✨

my narration:

Some days don’t bring fireworks

yesterday’s words remain

among the bedsheets,

shaken out like dust.

Arms stretch into a quiet

softer light;

the surface, still.

Even beneath

nothing stirs

and everything

just is.

My narration of the poem:

When there is fog

on the lake

I drift as though

in a bubble

not seeing the

whole lake and its

shores

or the geese i hear

not even the trees

and then

my little boat

carries me to

a cormorant

standing still

wings already dry

for a moment

I am not alone anymore

someone has entered my

little world

and regards me for a moment

before taking flight.

she is looking beyond the fog

she knows the sky is there

to soar

she is ready

and now

i too am ready

to trust the sky

and fly

See, the sky calls

Around the bend, an errant apple tree waits

and I am going there

There is a quote i kept from a Flannery O’Connor book that was rather dark.....and i think of it often..”no one was looking up”.

The book’s name is “Wiseblood”.......and it is dark...because the main character never quite gets anywhere....although he seems to be on a journey of some kind. Even writing this, feels daunting. There was this one moment......when love was there..waiting under a tree........by invitation….

I always felt that if he had actually answered love ... there under that tree......the whole ending would have been so different.......

Now we walk about....with cell phones...looking at statistics there.....data.... and miss the sky......and miss the face that is waiting under the tree.....and miss each other......

Don’t miss the sky.

Don’t miss each other.

Don’t miss the opportunity to break through the illusion

that holds you captive.

Is it safe?

No. Nothing in life is ever safe.

But if you never leap, you will never know what lies beyond

“Grief is the measure of our love.”

my narration of the poem:

I love you the way water welcomes rain

no drop you pour into me

is missed.

i revel in each ripple you make

as you enter my world

you do not linger on the surface

but change me quite irrevocably

with the music we make together

when you stop raining

i wait, open

for you to return

and if it never rains again

i will embrace the air

that once carried you to me.

is love worth it’s cost?

I realize that the answer doesn’t come in words, although I can answer in torrents of words and tears and story.

The answer comes with what I do with that absence that feels so present.

Where my waiting for the music we made returns a profound silence.

Where I speak in whispers to an empty room and feel you, somehow, listening

and then can somehow take just one more step tomorrow and love what is still here to love.

This page is gathering of things that I have brought into my own discernment process as I have moved through the past nine months, which have felt more like 9 months of relentless labor pains rather than a normal pregnancy. I could never include everything that has become a part of me as I bring my life into engagement with this substack community, but rather, I share only some.

Life itself is art. We are the masterpieces in progress..and when you look at it that way, every stroke has enormously high stakes involved….

Listening to a clip that one of you shared, I drew out the following:

“to make your soul grow” “to find out what’s inside you”

because they seem to be what it is that we can draw from any painful or fearful situation that might make something at least useful from it….and they seem to contain a kind of resistance and victory over the awful things humans try to do to each other.

Find out what is inside you and keep growing.

I reflect on this day, August 4, 2026:

— i find humility and resolve despite all fears I find joy coexisting beside the deepest pain and fear i ever knew. I find that hope in humanity still outpaces the sober facts of what humanity has done collectively and what has and is trying to be done to me, personally. i find the will to love and to be loved is so strong that i am willing to trust that what someone has said and promised me is true despite the fact that it seems wildly foolish. I discover that as i walk through, i have learned more in 9 months than i could have with the most expensive education…and what i have learned is so valuable, i hope the world will allow me to give from that font.

Recordar: Spanish word meaning “to remember” from the Latin re-cordis, to pass back through the heart. —from The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano

Discernment: the ability to pause and reflect in order to decide the direction one will move in. From the Latin word “discernere” which means to separate or divide—-as though teasing out various aspects of a situation or issue in order to sort what feels most true or most right to act upon and how to act upon what emerges from the process.

To discern well, we pass back what emerges through the heart.

Love directs the focus, the intent, and the movement.

Nothing is more practical than
finding God, than
falling in Love
in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.
It will decide
what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read, whom you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in Love, stay in love,
and it will decide everything.

—Fr. Pedro Arrupe S.J.

From Finding God in All Things: A Marquette Prayer Book © 2009 Marquette University as found on: https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-prayer/prayers-by-st-ignatius-and-others/fall-in-love/

The Five Transcendental Imperatives of Bernard Lonergan SJ:

Be attentive

Be intelligent

Be reasonable

Be responsible

Be in love

as once learned in my very first philosophy class long ago which happened to have been offered unbeknownst to me for students destined to be rocket scientists

and I carried this with me forever.

it was also the classroom i once attended, quite intoxicated, after having to drink all the leftover wine from the chalices after a Mass where there was a low attendance and the other eucharistic ministers had left me to do the clean up….. in my poem “This Poem Has No Name” you will see mention of this.

Am I running away from something or toward something?

I remember something someone once said. It was an oral historian named Studs Terkel, I believe. He said that people are either running toward something or away from something. I always think of that as i review my life and the direction i am choosing to go.

I ask myself, am I taking this step out of a desire to escape something?

And then i direct my thoughts towards where i am actually wanting to go.

What is the outcome I would like to experience? Is this next step likely to bring me closer to that?

When i do that, the choices I make feel more clear and right. We can be wanting to escape something that is harming us and at the same time, we can also be actively focusing upon the life we actually want to move towards. Both can coincide.

Links to be remembered:

about trust and an example that helps hope to return
about the way that wisdom is not finished after betrayal steals our ability to trust
my thank you to Augmented Man (the poet’s heart)
my thank you to Peter Blinky (the poet’s mind)
my thank you to ClarionX (the poet’s medicine)
the sound of silence--my dreams (the darkness of a great silence)
my thank you to Didier Hope (the integrated mind and heart in its embodied expression)
the mirror i want to be able to forever look in and see (what i want my mirror to always say)

turning fear into beauty
the original sin and what we do to each other
i am following care mantra
the worthwhile endeavor

the real definition of luxury

a mother’s love is sometimes loud

Justice and The Politics of Groups:

the value of allowing and welcoming dissent within a group

Laws regarding psychological torture

The Use of Freedom of Speech--Lyrics & Fire

The Judge Who never Read The Evidence--a piece by Quiet After Noise

Love, Courage, and Recklessness-from Augmented Man

This one gets a special place of its own on this page, because the suffering of the innocent and those who did nothing to deserve it……….matters more to me than I could ever say:

the question of how something can be good and destructive at the same time--and the question about what to do with that

NOTE:

I want to say more here………….in the hagiographies of many of the “saints”, as well as what i have seen people do when they claim thier collective prayers have saved one particular person….or that somehow Divine favor has rested on some person because they survived something others did not…….bothers me……..it will always bother me…..

As a nurse, I walked into rooms where people were losing their child…i held their hands and tried to bring as much relief to their child as I could and I listened and I held them in their pain. In the next room, a child was recovering from something truly scary and the parents were celebrating (that should be celebrated). I celebrated with them with complete genuineness just 5 minutes after being in the room where pain was so thick i swam in it. I felt that genuinely too.

It is when we try to rationalize or explain why someone gets better that I have trouble with…….because when we say: God chose my child to live……we are implying God did not choose for another equally beautiful child to live. I can not believe that with any part of me. We simply can’t see the whole grand picture….we shouldn’t try to answer it……..so we can honor those that are stolen from us way too soon…………. I love them all…..those who live and those who die……………I honor them all.

What do you think?

A special recognition: has been an unwavering friend here and he is a true master……..i am all admiration and love for him….. he made a poem that first brought me in here and i recognized him immediately…he lifts everyone……he is amazing.

the interior movement of unfolding life-Mark Crutchfield

I saw War Horse live in Boston when my travails began in 2014. I felt completely identified with that horse. I still do. And the message still rings true. That life brought me there is one of those mysteries i will not even attempt to solve.

That i am a “firehorse” in Chinese astrology…..is a mystery to me too. That my voice opened as though someone turned wide a spigot at the end of April is also a mystery.

All I know…is I am doing my best to live true to what i feel called to…and that is loving you all.

I add here, a post from Fady Bouaz, a great poet of peace 🙏🏻♥️🕊️♥️🙏🏻

This is both my sorrow (because we have been betraying this sentiment) and my greatest hope (that we can steer our ship back on track in line with these words):

Today, July 25th 2026, I write this…because you here at substack feel like my truest family and I need your prayers. From the family that will celebrate something without me tomorrow, I have been exiled. The post below says something of that.

Because of Lyrics and Fire and KCG….i remember today this prayer and song that has brought me through the most frightening times of my life. I hope it can be there for you too as you walk through whatever transformative period you are enduring. Transformation almost always feels like death is happening.

And now this goes here on this page…because i never heard it before and it feels like a lullaby……and it is so deeply comforting.

my narration:

We know what draws us

the way butterflies find flowers

the way a moth seeks after moonlight

to guide its path

there is also, with us

an inner correspondence

magnetic

unmistakeable

a sense of true north

it persists even when everything

hurls obstacles at it

a moth can be fooled by manufactured light

a flower can be laced with poison

a human can mimic true goodness

but only partially

if you grow quiet

you know which way to go

and you trust

even when manufactured lights are blaring

even when a storm interrupts the aroma of a rose

even when humans throw everything they can in the way

of you and your truest calling

it is about recognition

and that requires inner stillness

and utter devotion to something that often floats

like an aroma on a fresh cool breeze

The Universe speaks in flowers and sunlight and creatures and patterns………in aromas

and attractions and planetary movements. In a dynamic, magnetic pull across time and space…in patterns that one must grow utterly still to discern.

I have been listening……….I am devoted to what I am called to….utterly.

Some mysteries are to be listened to and believed, not solved.

—a morning glory that grew on my deck railing and stunned me with the brilliance shining from its center. It is what you can be if you let yourself trust that true generosity given despite the fear of betrayal or loss, is not weakness but the greatest victory that can be achieved by any human being. This is not me on my knees..it is me, strong, and wanting you to stop betraying the deep love i know is inside of you.

The words of my poem set to music with Suno using my voice:

Across oceans and time

even the tiniest spark of love ignites

the opening of flowers and wings,

the transfiguration of wounds to light,

the return of justice,

an invocation to flight.

A morning glory

revels in the sunlight that kissed and awakened it,

May it be so for each of us,

morning, after morning, after morning

Across oceans and time

even the tiniest spark of love ignites

the opening of flowers and wings,

the transfiguration of wounds to light,

the return of justice,

an invocation to flight.

A morning glory

revels in the sunlight that kissed and awakened it,

May it be so for each of us,

morning, after morning, after morning

I wrote the words for this poem, and then Suno came along and made it even better…I keep both, the Suno song and my original words. We work together now.

Suno— country version:

Sometimes a gate opens

and an ocean finally spills

who can say why

a man i never knew but for

one minute or two

and a long neglected horse being

finally cared for

would be that gate keeper.

But it is as though all the beautiful

people I’ve ever loved and lost are

mixed in the same cup of love with them

and so I let my ocean pour in torrents

not once feeling sorry for the mess I am

making of my saturated shirt

or the spectacle I have likely become

sitting here in my own living room.

The image is gone, but the poem remains

Our leaving is illusion

Love is never finished

I carry them with me in the life I live from now

Love is so much bigger than death that it nearly

swallows it whole.

In Honor of the Man Who Opened The Gate:

This poem was written by me and then put to music using Suno:

This morning I woke to a red sun rising

an ominous sign so goes the rhyme

my brain remembered;

my eyes saw

a bird of light and peace emerge

from a liquid ball of fire

The rest of the day followed suit

a calm shifted inner arrangements

momentarily made into peace

warning bells grew distant

and i stepped forward

sure that nothing is certain

even more sure that nothing

worthwhile

will happen if I don’t

own my steps.

This poem was written by me and then set to music with Suno:

you never know what your words will grow in others......you plant them and then they belong to that person...to grow or discard.........

It begins with planting something
maybe it is a little twig
or a tiny seed you need to pick up
with tweezers
it is never a sure thing that anything
will come of it
but you plant it
perhaps a kind glance at an angry neighbor
or a tear that spilled from your eye when you heard someone was hurt
or some cookies you baked to leave for a grieving person.
maybe it was planted and replanted over many years of believing in someone
despite all evidence that they might not have even kept it
perhaps it was planted as a choice you made to show up yet again, just one more time
for hope when there was no clear reason to believe
perhaps it was just a sentence you said during a particular moment
that just felt right

whatever it was... you left it there
trusted it would do its work in the way it was meant to
hoped it would
you left it there
because you believed in another’s capacity
to discern and grow and find their way
because once you planted it, it was no longer yours
because you know that it is not your right to try to fix
what is not broken, but unfolding its own life
maybe you planted something and even had to walk away

What matters is that you planted it.
“Do your work and then let go.”--said Lao Tsu
You did that yesterday, today and maybe tomorrow
in a million ways.

I walked about my yard today
remembering the days I planted
not knowing if anything would grow
never mind thrive.
Some didn’t make it.
Some did.
A deer ate the male holly to the ground
The rhododendron is still trying too hard
despite the amended soil
Two blueberry bushes are full of blueberries
after 6 years of nothing
The hazelnut shrubs
planted 9 years ago.
never yielded more than 3 hazelnuts
until today.
I marvel that today there are
so many hazelnuts the squirrels can’t
eat them all.
although, the labyrinth I planted them around
is long gone.
The hydrangea is covered in
white flowers that look like butterflies
The rose of sharon has her first summer blooms
and the clover i planted four years ago has finally
become a green river that flows between the trees.
And look, a baby oak tree that was only two leaves
3 years ago is taller than me.
I didn’t plant that one, he was an acorn that fell
from an old mother oak that died 4 years ago.
It was just his time.

These are things i planted that I can watch
over time.
Most things I plant, I can not watch.
They left with people I cared about
strangers I met along the way
Projects I was once a part of
Communities I once belonged to.

Sometimes it is okay to let things you planted
be what they will be.

i feel a need to tell why i never was able to give the retreat. It was because after I received my MDiv, I applied as a chaplain at a particular well known University and was told by my own pastor that the head chaplain didn’t want to hire me because he said he was worried I would have family obligations.

The Passage for Reflection:

Gospel Reading: Luke 13: 10-17---Reader 2

A Reading from Luke:

“Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.”

Reflection From the Point of View of the Bent Over Woman

(speaker stands in circle before the altar in a bent over position):

I am the bent over woman….for eighteen years (or perhaps much longer) I have been bent over like this…unable to look up or even straight ahead, never mind find the stars. Looking at me now, you would never imagine that there was a time when I dreamed and danced and sang and even shouted when I was mad. What has me so bent over? Something in me believed others when they told me I was not smart enough, not pretty enough, not rich enough, not practical enough, not good enough, not lucky enough, that my ideas were not worth much, that my heritage was of the wrong kind, that I was not male enough to lead, that my love didn’t matter much…….. Something in me believed them when they told me that I had to obey, submit, be quiet and nice….when they told me that my role was to please others….when they told me that my art work had to stay in the lines and my voice was no good for singing…and that I shouldn’t bother to dream, and that it was wrong to feel pleasure in my body…and that my body type was the wrong kind for dancing… Something in me believed that it was just my own tough luck that I was stalked and assaulted and betrayed. Something in me believed that I had to carry it all—the world of my life on my back—the children, the sick family members, a job, and also to somehow have a clean house, a well manicured lawn, a garden, to lower my carbon footprint, and also find the time to be a good friend, a good wife, a good mother, a good Catholic, a good citizen, and a good consumer. They said this is just the way things are. And something in me listened and kept me silent and crippled me. What is even worse, is I think that I have been walking by people that might have needed me because I can not look up from my pain, and my shame, and my exhaustion…I think maybe I have walked by a lot of beautiful things God has wanted me to stop and wonder at too….I think maybe there were dreams that I was meant to reach for but didn’t because I couldn’t stand up straight.

But then one day, as I went to pray…Jesus saw me…and told me that I was not meant to be bent over…that I was meant to stand tall…. that my dreams, and my love, and my joy, and my needs mattered, that my voice was beautiful, and that he loved artists that color outside the lines…and that I was meant to speak out when something hurt me or someone else…and that no one can carry their lives on their backs by themselves….that we need each other in order to thrive and flourish and grow….He told me that I shouldn’t make myself small because I am made in the image of God! I am a representative of the Face of God in the world and God’s voice and God’s hands and God’s feet…that all women and men are…that when something bends one of us over, when the world distorts and twists us up, it distorts the face of God that the world sees. He told me that I had something to give to the world that only I could give.

He told me to stand up…. and I stood straight and tall (speaker stands straight)…. perhaps not all at once and… not because he told me to, but because something in me knew he was right. But what is funny is that he told me, not in a male voice, but in the voices of all the dangerous and beautiful and strong women who showed me another way I could be…who showed me what I could become….

I invite you to take a moment now of silence and reflection in the loving and healing presence of Jesus and ask yourself….

what has you bent over?

I invite you to take some time to reflect upon your lives right now…just as you are experiencing them…

what bends you low?

When you are ready, write it down on the slip of paper at your chair.

Keep that paper. We will be laying it down by the river shortly.

The song that was in the planning notes:

Note: This message is not just for children and parents. I hope everyone reads it.

We seem to be experiencing a synchronicity of theme: Presence, Attention (tending), Noticing……and i would like to add the word “Pause”——- it is the precursor to the other words…….though “remembering” goes with it….

Remember to pause……..just a few moments…. then “noticing” becoming present, attention (tending) becomes not only possible, but the quality ripens………..

This message gives a foundational memory…to hold with you as you pause before another person or creature or even a rock………….. I hope it nourishes you and you make your own clay heart….and maybe let someone you love or meet add a special mark.

We leave our marks on everyone and everything we touch…what kinds of marks would you like to leave during your encounters with nature, humans, and everything?

Gospel
Matthew 22:34-40

“When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees they got together and, to disconcert him, one of them put a question, ‘Master, which is the greatest commandment of the Law?’ Jesus said, ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second resembles it: You must love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang the whole Law, and the Prophets also.”

NOTE: this is only realistic for a small group of people......but it may be able to be altered for a large group as well, perhaps by having multiple clay figures made in advance along with the one you are creating on the spot.....

Get a chair, and gather the children around you

Have a nice brightly colored bag in your hand..

in the bag are some small balls of model clay.......

Take out the red ball...and begin to work the clay in your hands....

you are forming a heart with hands and feet and a smile..........

as you are forming say:

“I am wondering what Jesus meant when he said that loving our neighbors as our selves was like loving God with all our heart and all our soul and all our strength. Are you wondering that too? Let’s wonder together for a while....” pause... (continue forming the clay heart)

I am creating something special in my hands...it is something that comes from inside me and it is a part of me...it says something about me and it is also a way for me to share what is inside me with you.....

You make things too....all the time....can you think of something you made lately and shared that was very special to you...that you thought was so beautiful and good?

Isn’t it nice when we share something we have made and love with someone else and they treat it with care and see its beauty and love it? When they do that...doesn’t that make you feel loved and special?

“God is like that too!!! But God makes living people....people with hands and feet and hearts and dreams and thoughts... how amazing!!! And God gives the people God makes to the world! Not to keep.....but to share God’s gift with each one of us!! And even though we share each other’s lives....each one of us really and always belongs to God....”

“But, something wonderful about God is that .......God lets us shape ourselves and each other through the ways we talk with, listen to, touch, and care for each other.....and so when we are each returned to God, we are not quite the same as when we began!! So it must make God feel really good and loved when we treat the people God has created with great kindness and love..........The truth is, that when ever we love and care for another person.....we testify to God’s love and we are also loving God.” (Finish up the clay heart)......

Hold up the clay heart... say: “Here it is!! My creation!!! Oh, it is so perfect and beautiful and simple and i would like to share it with you. I would like to pass it around so you each see it....i hope you really like it! I hope it makes you smile! and I want each of you to touch it and add something to it....a shape, a mark...maybe even a little decoration with this other ball of clay i am sending with it......and then when you all have spent just a little time with it....i would like you to offer it back to me.”

Pass the clay heart (and a small bag with extra little balls of clay) to the first person on your right......monitor..and make sure no one takes too long with it so everyone can have a small chance.... (play a song during this time: maybe----Testify to Love by Avalon)......

When it comes back to you....take it in your hands and behold it... say: “Ohhhhhhh Just look what we have done together!!! Thank you for loving me!”.........”Now go do that with each other and out there in the world....and just see what you and God can do together to bring love to everyone!!!”

poem placed to music using suno:

Strange objects

appearing on a rock by the lake

little bits of the story that happened there

left behind and found

laid out for someone to reclaim.

first it was one lone sock

then the sunglasses

a tiny plastic bag

What is that on the ground nearby?

we can’t see the whole story

or know who left what behind

or why

only what is there.

When someone is deeply transforming

it is like that to behold

they discard remnants of what was.

Only they can tell the meaning.

And only when that transformation is complete.

or years later

And yet, they may need to tell someone as they go through it.

We need spaces to hold people gently

as they slough off their old caterpillar bodies

and gain wings

like this gentle, steady rock

we hold what they trust us with

without judging

we only hold with open hands.

Butterflies can’t dry out their wings

if we hold them tight or try

to unfold them too early.

Butterflies can’t fly if we squeeze them

too tight in our hands.

Butterflies unfold in their own time

Fly when they are ready

We can trust that.

We need to trust that.

a thought arises:

I have noticed that when people are in the midst of major inner transformation…it often scares the people around them…and then they start being told things like: “I recommend you have a psychiatric evaluation” …or …. maybe you should go to a counselor…and then a lot of counselors challenge the actual positive thing that is happening. And this can slow things down or stall the process, especially because at that point defense systems could understandably kick in.

We need ways of identifying the difference between a real need for counseling and psychiatry and the normal transformative process…this might prove difficult because we all do it differently……. any thoughts?

There are certain spaces and posts that I keep returning to... I have been thinking of that.

When I was a new nurse, I was told that when one needed to do some kind of procedure with a child (ex. cleaning a wound and wrapping it), that it was easier if the parents were not in the room because the child didn’t react the same way. I never did that to a child. It would have felt like such a betrayal. Yes, the children i cared for cried harder and complained louder with their parents there......that was because they felt safe to express how it really felt for them. And that is how i loved those children...I wanted them to feel safe to tell me exactly how things felt. I say this......because I return here..to this precise post...and there are others too.......because before them, I feel safe to be exactly as sad and scared as I sometimes am.

Thank you, to those of you who have given me that space.

What makes you feel safe to cry and feel scared and say exactly how things are for you? Are you feeling safe even doing that for yourself?

I think we all need a safe space like that…………

I am reaching to you all with a life rope.

It is a special way of sitting down beside the things that are happening within you. I have used that life rope myself. It doesn’t fix the world we are currently experiencing as collapsing. What it does do is give you a foundation in yourself that you can stand in as we all walk through together.

If you want me to walk with you as you try this, i am happy to. You can tell me in my DM. I can use Zoom, with the camera on or off to meet with you and then you can practice with someone who feels safe and who knows how to give you a safe space to try it. I have done this with hundreds and hundreds of people. I am not a therapist.

But you are not broken. You are just trying to navigate a world that is really difficult in this now of things.

An old journal entry:

Friday, September 16, 2022 Morning Page

Today’s focus: compassion, inner peace and the butterfly. 🙏🏻🕊️🦋

A butterfly signals transformation into flight and she receives her nourishment from flowers. She begins as a caterpillar who feeds on the green leaves of wild native plants. Then she spins a tight layer of silk about herself and stays inwardly to allow the transformation to happen in its own time. Humans don’t always get to stay indoors during our transformation into flight. We still need to be acting in the world. This tends to mean that our hard work of transformation is quite visible to others, as is our vulnerability in those times. Surely there must be a way to go about it to protect the fragile changes we experience. I have often suggested to the inmates at York that they can look at their time of confinement in cells and behind walls as a ripe time for self reflection and the work of transformation. A sort of chrysallis. but in that, i must not overlook the fact that they must also interact with each other and transformation can be a tumultous upside down time. So, how do i protect myself when I am “transforming” after a loss or a learning or a change that makes me uncomfortable or uncertain? I realize that a few years ago, my own transformation was not so graceful, but very raw and way too public. That made it more difficult, i think for several reasons. The first is that after the wounds had transformed, others did not see it right away and my tender wings were not yet ready to be touched and so i was doubly vulnerable because if someone touched me harshly, they may have damaged the wings that weren’t quite ready to fly.

So, then, how do we protect ourselves when we are going through a period of deep inner change? There must be a non physical way to create boundaries around the process. A sort of inner chrysalis to spin that can protect the unfolding process and new growth. This makes me think the word, boundary. An intentional setting of a boundary around our struggle to grow and change. Rather than becoming the tender shoot that a boot crushes the life out of. The inner hands of the heart must come around the places where change is happening and keep their fragile growth safe. And, we must also find ways to nurture what is not yet fully formed. One way is to not talk so much about it and particularly not to certain people. I remember now, the kinds of people not to tell so readily. They are the ones that too quickly give advice and begin immediately recounting their expertise and their own experience and drawn meanings from situations in their lives that may or may not bear resemblance. This takes away from someone’s sense of the validity of their own experience and the meanings that are unfolding within them. Perhaps, for example..what happened 4 years or 5 years ago was not the result of making the “wrong” choice but due to the unforeseen difficulties and choices another quite surpisingly made. this is one of the issues i have with social media like FB. The pat advice given out as wisdom doesn’t always fit and sometimes victimizes. For example: the ever ubiquitous notion that “we create our experiences.” While it has a truth, because we ultimately are the ones that give a meaning to what we experience, we are not the sole players in that experience. how could we be, if what Gendlin says is true, and i think it is...that we are first and foremost interaction. We can’t exist outside of interaction. It is what bodies are, after all. If we bumped into nothing at all...would we still experience anything? i think not. This bumping into, is how we grow, how we can learn, how we can be nourished and also how we can be harmed. A butterfly

floating about can be killed by a car very easily, not seeing it coming. the butterfly didn’t create that. the driver likely didn’t intend it, but yet both were involved in the experience. and now, here i am thinking of all this. So, the question is, again, how to maintain inner peace when our very being is shifting into something quite new. how do we hold the unknowingness of what life will be like after the shift? Who do we choose, if at all, to share that experience with...to walk with us? Where do we place the complicated emotions that rise up and sometimes seethe as we process traumas and betrayals and things that we encounter that impact our capacity to move with agency through the world, hope, dream and thrive? I am remembering a young woman’s words, “I realize that what I really need now is something i can hope for.” And indeed, that is what we all need. Our inner chrysallis must protect hope, even if it is just a tiny sapling or a seed deep in the earth as well as our belief that we can and will not only endure, but thrive. That our experience of anything is both valid and also in flux, ever shifting, ever unfolding ever becoming. That we won’t crawl forever, we are destined for wings even if there is no solid guarantee that we will get there because life is full of surprises. I feel my mind wandering now. Perhaps I have exhausted this topic. I haven’t even spoken at all about compassion, “to feel with” I am not even sure what to say except that it is absolutely vital in this world. No one wants their suffering to meet a steely gaze of judgment and harshness. because the wounds are our point of transformation. They are the locus where we have an opening to shift our beliefs and understandings and act in a new way as a new being. But they hurt when they are still open and open areas are places on a body where harmful bacteria and poisons can enter and wreak havoc. and yet....we heal.

The words of this poem placed to music with Suno

I pass the window,

a beauty moth rests,

open winged

tinged with sunlight

tapping the glass pane.

It is designed to fade into

the color of trees

but today it has chosen

not to hide.

Disconnected from

its own history

it has no mouth

it flies

it rests

It can not tell me

if it knows it will

be gone within

four days.

The stone circle and the

trees behind it

swerve out of view

as I sense an urgency

to notice

something with wings

so fleeting.

The Epimecis hortaria or Tulip Tree Beauty Moth, is from the family Geometridae which comes from the Ancient Greek root “geo” which means earth and “metron,” meaning measure.

It is not often seen flying during the day and it has no mouth. It doesn’t eat for the duration of its life with wings.

It only flies for four days.

The reference speaks of concealment, competition, and the way scientists, who had few sitings of this nocturnal creature, named it after the way it moved when it was still a caterpillar.

I think about the way people are often measured and named by histories.

Reference: https://vineyardgazette.com/news/2025/08/22/beauty-moth

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NOTE: This poem is a republishing of an original poem that didn’t appear in my published poems list in the dashboard. Because in the recent past, some of my poems have been sabotaged, I republished this one today when it was missing. Shortly after that, as I was with support, I went back to check again, and the original poem showed up.

Here is what support said may have happened and what to do if it happens to you:

“Yes, it could have been a temporary glitch.

We do have a known issue where parts of a page can briefly disappear, and if the poem has now reappeared, that fits with a transient platform issue rather than a permanent deletion.

If it happens again, one useful next step is to refresh the page once and check the Posts list again.

If you have a screenshot from when it was missing, I can help you turn this into a bug report.”