And here is the latest GPS photo of where she has been and where she is. The little "envelope" symbols show when we have texted through her GPS system:)
Prior to her trip she asked friends to send her favorite poems appropriate to a pilgrimage. She has a lovely practice of choosing a line from a poem - just one or two lines - and walking with them, mediating on them, letting them work on her. I can't wait to get a copy of that collection after you get home Kathryn! (I know she won't be reading this until September:). Here is one poem she sent to me before she left:
Rewild Yourself: Be Your Own Medicine
There are places in you
Where thousands of bright, tiny flowers
Open each morning to the sun
In meadows as vast as the sky.
An ancient alchemy courses through your bones.
It speaks in feathers and stones and
precious metals and the footprints of mandalas
left by the stories we tell with our lives.
Rewild yourself.
Until green tendrils sprout from your fingernails
And lichen swathes your eyebrows.
Rewild yourself.
Until your roots spread and uncoil and
Writhe down through soil and rock.
Rewild yourself.
Rise up into your magnificence and
Take your place among the constellations.
Rewild yourself.
The Earth is her own medicine.
Be yours.
Caroline Meller
I am so enjoying these posts, Catherine. Here is a statement by John Cage that I have been wanting to add for your and everyone's reading pleasure:
ReplyDelete"When you start working, everybody is in your studio--the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas--all are there. But as you continue painting [or writing or creating], they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave." May it be so!