LETTING THE ENTRAILS SPEAK

Apprenticeship to Love: The crooked path of sacred marriage (October 15, 2026)

TODAY'S QUESTION

Are you feeling the currents of today? Whether in the events of the world, the events of your marriage or friendships, or the events of your body, are you able to fully feel these currents, and allow yourself to be still and strong enough to hold them even as you feel them pulling you this way and that?

TODAY’S MEDITATION

I am again crying.

This life asks a lot of us, you and me. In the end, it asks everything.

Well, maybe it doesn't ask so much as take. Everything.

Just as it gives me the joys and sorrows of breath and being, this life takes them away. And every taking both wrenchingly painful, and allowed.

It should be a pain I feel, fully and awfully, and then surrendering to. Because what is it, this life, if not the gift of enjoying breath and beauty and sometimes even love, for a few moments. Maybe years. If I'm lucky, decades. And, I am lucky.

...

Still, I know the wrenching grief of death and loss.

I know how these can cast a long and dark shadow.

...

Yesterday was a day of tears. This is what I practice, for: to have these tears, to feel, to be sensitive to the world around me and within me.

I practice that I can “hold onto myself” and allow these tears to take me deeper than I want to go, to —perhaps— hold the grief and find within myself a greater capacity to love.

…

I’m feeling vulnerable right now.

A rare moment with my beloved. And, now, my second Covid experience (minor, but still weakening). Perhaps the solar eclipse that just shadowed us. All of these rippling through & around me.

...

Reading the entrails of a slaughtered animal was once a way of understanding the world. Now, I try to read the entrails of things that stir my feelings of grief, and love.

I practice to become sensitive to the pain of the world. I practice to be able to, perhaps, feel its signficance. For me if no other. I can begin here: how does this moment in the world and in my life, how does it affect me?

From this, other effects come to my attention. With care and awareness I may hold those effects —and their affects, the feelings that flow from them— more gently. And with this gentleness and my strength I may guide them home.

I am larger than these feelings. I am big enough to feel, and stand. To hold. To guide.

Perhaps now I may actually have something to offer the world, to the men and women I listen to, to my children and my grandchildren, my sister and mother. Perhaps. When I trust my heart to be enough.

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS

🌀…Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think ... As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him. (David Halberstam, 1965)

🌀…some of us will forever always take the side of innocents. Of children.
Of those suffering. Of humanity.
Will not discard our power analyses and will not dehumanize any people. Some of us know that there is a path back from these horrific endless cycles of violence and suffering. From terrorism and collective punishment, flattening buildings, from the murder of families. Who know that freedom and liberation is not pie. That, in fact, we only get some if everybody has some. (Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg)

🌀If we know the practice of non-practice, we don’t have to strive or fight. We simply allow our body to heal. We allow our mind to heal. Don’t try anything. Allow yourself to relax, to release all the tension in your body and all the worries and the fear in your mind. (Thich Nhat Hanh)

🌀I want to be seen. I want to be accepted as I am. And loved for that. (My beloved, she who is my oracle and my siren)

-Rev. Hans
rev.hans@sacredbodies.ca

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