a Sanskrit Buddhist mantra that has been coming to mind lately:

Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha

there are lots of translations, but i like the version: Gone Gone BeyondGone BeyondBeyondGone Awaken Andsoitis

(gone, like: so gone, you're here...
form is emptiness : emptiness form)

i've been repeating this mantra for a couple weeks and it is not through with me yet.

although it's pronounced with a long e (like gatay), i see the word "gate" and think of thresholds, passageways and the rites we invent to mark our movements from one side to the other of a time or a place or all of the above.

every now and then on a very special day on the beaches where we live, you might be a human who finds an agate. and how can i not see:

a gate

we are in portal times

passageways

thresholds

somewhere between old ways that have been the roads the routes (think: lines, linearity, straightness, speed, efficiency) for hundreds of years...

and the ways that are coming (or maybe coming back from a deeper pre-codex past?) that embrace different kinds of pathways: those that meander, diverge, err, spiral, return...take up different relations. they have swiftness sometimes and sometimes slowness and invite delight in all the paces and times and possibilities human being can shift through...

how are you feeling in the portal of these eclipses?

what's coming up?

what's coming up extra loudly?

perhaps wanting you to:

see it

thank it

let it go?

sometimes who i am feels held in place by the people around me, by the webs of relations that keep me in my place and give me a sense of who i am...

but pull at the webs, change the relations, become far flung and everything shifts, and suddenly there is the question:

who am i?

who do i want or need to be?

what is the creativity that nourishes me?

you don't need to go far from home to sense this...you can choose a different way to walk to work, a different morning ritual, choose to tell yourself a different set of stories.

just for today.

i am in a country where little red flowers guide the tracks of the trains i ride...i assumed in the rush of the train that they were tulips...but when i had the chance to walk on the earth and not be speeding by, i came to see that they were poppies...

a very different flower

maybe it's as simple as how you cut an apple...

cut it the "wrong" way

and you can see the star

the root word for prayer and precarity are the same: precari, a Latin word meaning to entreat, to ask, to beg...an open relation where one reaches out in request to an other.

and i guess the precarity is that i do not know how the other will respond, i do not know if my prayer will be answered, my entreaty granted.

but i keep somehow thinking that just the prayer, just the entreaty, just the turning towards and opening to an other––this changes me.

i deepen through it (whether my prayer or call is "answered" or not) the turning toward and opening is perhaps one form of "answer."

i recently got to see a 2001 piece by the artist Jenny Holzer that is a garden bench.

it sits inconspicuously at the edge of a garden otherwise full of more sculptur-y sculptures. and although it has words etched deeply into it, i watched as many art-witnessers glanced at the surface of the bench only momentarily before thankfully sitting down on it to rest.

the multiplicity of the garden bench's offering made an impression on me: it seemed happy enough to be a place of rest, a beautiful outside object (made of the same Istrian stone that built the city where it lives), and also a text, a weave: a poem, entreaty, prayer.

as always, email me if you need a session or if i can support you during this time.

and stay tuned for SPRING ANTHEMS & SUMMER JAMS, my two next workshop offerings.

with love,

Litia

"i pulse i pray i pray aloud"