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Sunday Gathering
October 29, 2023 @ 9:00 am - 12:00 pm
Join us!
Sunday’s Schedule:
Sunday’s Program and Reading:
Sunday, October 29, 2023
We Have Questions: How Can We Honor the Bones of Our Ancestors?
Speaker: Ruth Zwald, retired social worker/minister, makes her home on a farm, starting every dawn with good coffee and the crow of the rooster. She is a Mesa Carrier on the Peruvian Medicine Path, which involves personal healing, transformational healing for others, and creating ceremony and ritual for ourselves and for the earth.
Musicians: Folias Duo, flutist Carmen Maret and guitarist Andrew Bergeron, are a married couple whose unique interpersonal performer-composer collaboration of twenty years breathes new life into classical music. Their music melds characteristics of European classical music with jazz, world music, and the art of improvisation.
Music: Folias Duo
Gathering Host: Nelleke Knarr
Music: Folias Duo
Meditation: Charlotte Rozich
Moment of Silence
Reading/Teaching: Ruth Zwald
The ancestors want you to know, you are not required to carry their pain. Your mother did not spin the web that nets you, you wove it from your own desire. Yesterday’s rain won’t nourish this flower; the new sun drank last night’s tears.
Your grandmothers are singing for you to birth your own unbearable happiness.Your grandfathers’ bones are praying for you to hunt the sweetness in your own marrow. You think you must stand like a warrior in the withering crossfire of your father’s blood. But what wounds you is the wavering blade of your mind, slashing the past and future.
If you insist on making reparations, plant a wild pine; let it be a tree of Presence. You cannot pay them for the privilege of breathing, for awakening this solitude of beauty. They need no libation, they thirst for no offering.They are not hungry ghosts, but earthworms who luxuriate in loam, shards of sunlight lodged in magnolia blossoms. Do not carry them; they do not carry you. They bear their own grief and laughter.The past is vanishing smoke, the flame is now. Be christened with this breath; name yourself. You sleep alone in the chamber of your ribs. No one else enters and leaves your lungs. A mother kissed you, a father held you; you owe them nothing for this. They did it for themselves; now let them be about the business of their next childhood.
Father your heart, Mother your body. Hold and kiss new sparkling babies. Give them your grandmother’s name if you must, but not as a weight, not as a brand on the hip; but as a prayer, a promise of astonishment for what has not yet been conceived. — Alfred LaMotte, What the Ancestors Want
Music: Folias Duo
Gathering Host: Nelleke Knarr
Music: Folias Duo
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