St. Brigid
Visited me on her feast day
Good afternoon, friends. I am on retreat for the next few days with my Clergy Coven and the Trappist monks in Berryville. Here’s is the morning view from my bedroom window…
It is a relief to spend a few days away from my routines and distractions to center down in a silent community of deep spiritual practice with four women who have been my retreat group for the last 20 years. The soil is rich and much is communicated without words.
It has been a while since I’ve been here.
The first time was for my pre-ordination retreat in 2002. I hiked into the monetary from Harper’s Ferry on the Appalachian Trail. The retreat brother was a little surprised and wondered if a homeless woman was trying to find shelter for the night.
The last time was to officiate a funeral for a parishioner. The monks have a natural burial cemetery on their land that is at the edge of the Shenandoah River. The body is not embalmed, the coffin is biodegradable, there is no headstone, only a river rock that is engraved with the name of the deceased. Over time, the river floods and recedes. The stone will move. The body will decay. This life on earth is a lesson in impermanence and change.
Knowing that change is woven into the fabric of life and we can never step into the same river twice… there are also moments when we are transported to a sensation we have experienced before. An awareness that pierces through the passage of time and collapses the years into an infinite oneness. Here is a little poem I started yesterday morning about one of those moments.
St. Brigid Yesterday morning, I heard a robin sing outside my grey dawn window closed tight against the cold. The sound floated into my ear like a forgotten familiar scent, transporting me to a sensation of time and place rooted in memory awakening in the present moment, Spring. I put down my coffee cup and turned to gaze at the frozen ground looking for Brigid to appear. All was still, silent, ice. Winter. And yet, buried under single digits, snow and ice unmelted, the Robin song awakens my heart to the smell of soft brown earth full of growth and expectation.