Welcome to all of you who are new to the Museletter! I've added lots of names as a result of my work at the Dominican Institute for the Arts, which was an event so moving and heart-filled that I cried like a toddler when they sang their blessing song to me at the end.

It reminded me of riding back home in the car after a full day at the NY State Fair when I was young. I'd be in the back seat between my brother and sister, crying my little eyes out. My brother would say to my mom, "What's she crying for?" and my mother would turn half-around and say in all her wisdom, "Don't worry about her. She just had too much fun." I felt the same way with the Dominicans in Columbus, Ohio.

When I saw three sisters walk in in full habit, I wondered if I'd be too "out there" for them. Mistakenly I assumed that traditional habit meant traditional thinking--but in fact, the opposite was true. These were three sisters who had been living in a cloistered monastery for 40 years, hidden away from the world to devote themselves to contemplation, liturgical prayer, work, and sacrifice. But something had happened to them, a new idea had taken root, and the three of them were coming out...out of the cloister, out of the silence and separation, and into the world in response to a call they heard to bring their gifts forward to the common table. They are joining with another group of sisters in Delaware to create a new monastery and a new lifestyle that adresses the needs of these times.

These are remarkable times we're living in, full of contradiction and contrast and invitations to wholeness and authentic being--all the ingredients for creative combustion. Today is the anniversary of the day Lucretia Coffin Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the convention on women's rights in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. It was the start of the organized women's rights movement in America and they discussed property rights, divorce and women's suffrage. It took 72 more years for women to get the vote. What we're living for, working for, co-creating, is not happening fast, but it IS happening. Have you listened to a five year old lately? Have you visited TED? Checked out the videos on youtube? If not, take a look at these and watch what happens to your belief in humankind and all our relations..
Beyond Our Wildest Imaginings
Creativity is Contagious
Let the Children Lead Us
An Interesting Experiment

These works are antidotes to the despair and anger our media is provoking. We are making our own news, sharing our own stories, spinning our own web of connectedness and communion. We are creating new sacraments of engagement and bestowing them freely and joyfully wherever we go. We are re-pairing the opposites, transcending the dualities, and finding our commonness and strength in the circles we're creating.

As I wrote in the Intro to The Art of Original Thinking,

"As with any creative endeavor, originality in thinking, in being, requires a heightened state of alertness, a bridging of the poles, a show of fearlessness and willingness to forfeit the known for the unknown, the learned for the experienced. It requires a trust deeper than the sea, for what it asks for is a letting go, an unmooring from the safe harbor of certainty for a journey into the mists of mystery and possibility...The solutions to the crises of our time do not lie dormant in one individual. They live like seeds in every one of us. It is not a savior who will rescue us from the plight and perils we face, but a communion of saints who go by our names."

I wish for each of you a heightened awareness of your many gifts, a deepening of your own wisdom, and a widening of the circles that support and sustain you. And thanks to all of you for being MY circle of support!

Love and blessings your way,
Jan

 

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