Category Archives: Jamie Ridler

Wishcasting Wednesday

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from Jamie’s post

What is your heart’s wish?

With every beat my heart wishes to experience and manifest more love, but besides more love, its wish is: to write a book, many books, to string words together like prayer flags or mala beads, to live the life of a writer, quiet and solitude and reading and long walks and up early and dogs at my side or curled up at my feet, and thinking and dreaming and imagining, and having long conversations about how and why, and love, love, love, and the tenderhearted wise sadness of being present and of knowing how love goes and how things are and how this works, and grief and letting go and surrender, and friendship, and moving not the way fear makes me move but the way love makes me move, and allowing my “soft animal body to love what it loves,” and meditation and rumination and contemplation, step by step and word by word, being still and listening with my whole heart, being curious and gentle, saying only what is true and helpful and kind, being fearless in that way that gives a gift of the same to others so that they too can notice and manifest their basic goodness, to wholeheartedly live a full life and write about it…this is my heart’s wish.

My heart also wishes for flight, and no matter how often or carefully I explain the laws of physics and the impossibility of a wingless lump of muscle and blood floating on the air, it insists and continues to dream that it will one day wake with wings and fly away. It says that hope is not the thing with feathers at all, love is, and that its capacity for love will be the magic that makes it soar, that unhinges it from this mortal, ground-bound body. And I must admit, kind and gentle reader, sometimes I get caught up in the fire of its faith and find myself almost believing it.

Wishcasting Wednesday

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image from jamie’s post

What do you wish for this summer?

My biggest wish for this summer is that the High Park Fire will be 100% contained, controlled, stopped, extinguished. That the fire fighters will stay safe, that no more homes will burn, no more harm will be done, and no more fires will start this summer.

That Eric and I and our two boys have a safe trip to Oregon, and then back to Colorado. That our drive is smooth, easy, and without issue or complication, that the dogs stay cool and comfortable, and we arrive in Oregon (and then Colorado) with little effort or suffering. And that our Big Rig functions as a vehicle of love and light that protects everyone we pass or follow or meet along the way. That anyone else traveling in this same time frame is also safe.

driftwood beach, where we’ll be walking in just a few days

That I practice mindfulness and gratitude, experience rest and play and joy while we are in Oregon. I need the rest, and I want to connect wholeheartedly to the joy of the present moment and sink into it fully.

hiking two years ago at cape perpetua, on the oregon coast

That I have a good experience at the World Domination Summit. That I don’t freak out, I don’t push or bully myself to do too much, I don’t try too hard, don’t sink into feeling unworthy or afraid that I’m missing something, that I remain safe and well, and that I get to, in a kind and gentle way, meet the people on the list I carry in my heart and tell them to their faces “thank you and I adore you.” That I can have confidence, “the willingness to be as ridiculous, luminous, intelligent, and kind as you really are, without embarrassment” (Susan Piver).

Happy, comfortable, safe beach dogs.

Naps, eating seafood, reading, writing, yoga, meditation, walks on the beach, hiking, meeting new friends, long conversations about nothing and everything, laughter, love, love, love.

where the forest meets the sea

And this, from Mary Oliver (shared here this morning), this is what I wish, not just for summer, but for my life. And for you as well, kind and gentle reader. Happy first day of summer and much love to you. May you have everything you wish for this summer as well.

The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?