Rhythm & Respiration

Rhythm & Respiration
Reflecting on nature-based therapy, learning, well-being and value-added life ...

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Embodied Word



Merry Christmas!

Well! The ‘weather outside is frightful,’ but it is not exactly ‘beginning to look a lot like Christmas,’ at least in terms of frosted evergreen trees and snowflakes … No, instead we are having a true Pacific coastal Christmas: ‘let it rain, let it rain, let it rain!’

But, inside it is beginning to look like Christmas … I’m taking a break from wrapping presents and writing this greeting to you …

We wanted to thank you for your kindness, support, prayers, and the long-suffering friendship that you’ve shared with us, especially in the past year. Two-OH!-Fifteen has been quite the year for Vincent! As you know, winter into spring, Vincent went from immobility due to an injury, to a below-knee amputation, to living days as the bionic man and evenings ‘rollin, ’rollin,’ rollin’ … it’s a difficult road to adjust to the far-from-perfect technology of prosthetics. There are many, many frustrating moments and painful steps along the way. It takes courage, patience, and initiative to continue on that road, and we thank you again for your ongoing supportive friendship and keeping us in heart and mind.

Our animal kids, Puck, Arael, Janna, Maggie, and Gabriel, were such a blessing to me while Vincent was in the hospital, and continue to encourage Vincent to increase his mobility … and daily they make us laugh! Their cheerful steadfastness, persistent good will, and present-moment engagement are a huge gift to us. Toward the end of the summer, our herd grew by one: Tivio, a Quarter horse retiring from Timberline Ranch, joined Puck and Arael, rounding out our little herd nicely. We are blessed, and are grateful for the gifts we have been given—including your friendship.



Blessings on you and yours during this Holy Season,

Faith & Vincent Richardson 






Word



It’s all in a word.
It’s all in our heart: soul-center and mind choosing the mundane, madness, or more …
The mundane sees wet dirt as mud;
The madness fears a sucking quicksand.
The more seeks more and finds amphibious earth bursting with life, restless and resettling.
Words and heart—faith if you will—wait for the life we grant them.
The “dwarves are for the dwarves,” CS Lewis wrote as Narnia ended.
Instead of a king’s banquet, they saw a half-eaten turnip and manure-laced straw.
It’s all in a word; it’s all in the heart.

What if we reframed ‘upsetting’ to ‘setting up’?
If typhoon winds, warm with wild wet,
Powered roots to burst from soil,
Unburied rocks to see the stars,
And lifted fathom-deep ocean currents to salt the air?

What if wisdom rode hard across the sky righting the night?
Clearing a clinging fog of fear,
Scattering splinters of ice rage,
Blowing high dark wells of sorrow, geysers of guilt and gloom releasing like springs, flying far...

What if faith drove night to flight?
The dark stretching like an inky balloon,
Thinning, weakening, straining to hold the void,
Bursting in a myriad of stars.

Would we then see the celestial diamond hanging in the stable air?
The wild migrant Child cloaked in the gold of cattle?
The misunderstood mother tired and pleased and tired?
The waiting spouse, listening, wondering, reckless with his open heart?
Would we hear the singing of trees, valleys, stars, and sheep?
Drink in the fragrant wind of angels rushing to greet the homeless on the hills?

The one-dimensional line curved across a page is flat, still, soundless until read aloud.
It is in the lungs that life is given to words in a book; Emmanuel.
It is in the soul-heart that life is quickened, stirred; and in the heart-mind where life is chosen.
The Child, wail arrested on a Christmas card Nativity, is frozen in December, trapped in a gilded envelope by the mundane and madness of a fearful world.                                                                                                                                                                                                 
But blind faith-eyes see more.

Three winds of Wisdom ride hard on that night.
Up-setting the whole world to holy.

FSR

Christmas, 2015