Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics

They may be calculated risks; they may yield entrepreneurial fruits, or they may simply enrich our own lives. Creative risk taking might not turn our life upside down but, rather, might right the drifting ship of our soul. When we make ourselves available for the inflow of Shakti, we accept not only her generative power but also her ability to dest

For Teresa, union was a matter of embracing every particle of inescapable reality as imbued with, dripping with, overflowing with divinity.

make time for beauty, the universe miraculously expands to welcome it. You find yourself picking up the guitar you hadn’t tuned since college and noodling around. Suddenly you can play “House of the Rising Sun” again, and it sounds better than ever, seasoned as it is by all those years of unfortunate choices and sweet suffering. Instead of watching

Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, it is the women who transmit the living heart of religion, lighting the candles, singing the prayers, cleaning up the afterbirth, and bathing the dead.

That’s when we recall that there is no separation between ourselves and Ultimate Reality. What we have been seeking has found us and absorbed us into itself.

Haiku is precise. It conforms to an exact syllabic count: the first line has five syllables, the second has seven, and the third has five. Within that container the poet’s wings expand in all directions, touching the ordinary and rendering it extraordinary. There is freedom in form.

Like bees, we draw nectar from them all. We cross-pollinate, helping to propagate and support a more robust and resilient ecosphere.

Whenever my jeans become a little tight, my self-worth begins to deflate.

Whenever I take off my clothes he gasps as if I were Venus stepping off the half shell and into his arms, even though we have been together for a couple of decades and I’m showing signs of wear and tear by now.