I have had a hard time being human. I know that sounds funny. Walking around in this body and all, for thirty nine years. But, staying in my body has been hard. I am a feel good, soar into the clouds, kind of gal. Rooting down into the earth of of my flesh and bones does not come easy to me. But, India. Well, India helped me stay in my body. With her spices, her heat and dirt, her big toothy smiles, heads bobbing side to side, bright red saris, loud auto rickshaws, rich curries, she kept my cells awake. And I want to thank her for that.
I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question: How are you? 
I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question: What is God? 
If you think that the Truth can be known
From words, 
If you think that the Sun and the Ocean Can pass through that tiny opening Called the mouth,
 O someone should start laughing!Someone should start wildly Laughing –Now! Hafiz
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| Posted by Jenny Finn at | | | |
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We visited an orphanage and school in Ho Chi Minh City. Picture this. Children sitting in beds, rocking furiously back and forth. Others tied to their beds because if they weren't, they would knee themselves in the head. Some wheeled themselves around in chairs. A little boy cried for minutes because his arm was stuck in a strap. Ten children were put in a circle and fed out of the same bowl with a spoon. A girl laid on her stomach and kicked her leg against a metal bed frame. What do we do with this? Well, I sang. Andrew and Lizzie played. And Andy threw a football back and forth and held the hands of a child and jumped up and down. What do you do with motherless children? Well, you mother them. And when we do, we mother ourselves. With a Love much bigger than ourselves. I am running into that Big Mama a lot lately.
Andy at the orphanage in the courtyard
Andrew and Andy trying to sign to speak to the child in the background, who is deaf
Lizzie playing with a child at the school for the deaf
Two children I colored pictures with at the school
Even after all this time,
the sun never says to the earth,
"You owe me."
Look what happens with
a love like that.
It lights the whole sky.
Hafiz
We need a Love like that. The world needs a love like that.
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| Posted by Jenny Finn at | | | |
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The seed of God is in us.
Given an intelligent and hard-working farmer,
it will thrive and grow up to God,
whose seed it is; and accordingly, its fruits will be God-nature.
Pear seeds grow into pear trees,
nut seeds into nut seeds,
and God-seed into God.
Meister Eckhart
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| Posted by Jenny Finn at | | | |
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Sink deeply enough into the waves of life and you will experience beauty. Beauty is getting bigger as I travel the world. How I defined beauty is akin to a blowing up a balloon. The balloon of beauty now includes something new. Suffering. Contradiction. Paradox. Emotion. And something beyond emotion. Landscape. People. Beauty is big. It has to be bigger than what I thought it was. Because the small slice of beauty that we are served up in our culture just ain't gonna cut it, quite honestly. The more deeply I sink into the anchor of my heart, in movement, in stillness, in breath and body, mind, spirit and heart, the wider I am becoming. My heart is expanding to new places. I hurt. I weep. I laugh. I look into a man's eyes and see a grief that I hope I never know. I look into a child's eyes and hear them scream mother. I dance connection in the middle of a Cambodian plaza with my brothers and sisters from around the globe. I sing to a child's rocking body and for split second, feel starvation and want to run away. And know that I can. I can run away. And then I feel guilty, then gratitude. I walk outside and I cry. And I throw a football to a child who cannot walk. And see them smile. And I smile. I hear stories of horror from a man named Soka, the Khmer word for happiness. We share the same birthday month and year. Same, same. But different. I hear that a lot here. There are even t-shirts made "Same, same, but different." I see the sun shine through barbed wire that once held people against their will because of their occupation. I see flowers bloom next to a prison and a shrine that hold thousands of skulls of a genocide people. And I see my son, who after learning children in this genocide had their heads shaved before they were killed, left the museum and went straight to a tree. Straight to a tree. He needed roots. We all do. And those roots lead right back into this big beautiful mother earth. Straight into the dirt. We long for beauty rooted in something sustainable.
Something bigger is holding us. It is no longer just ethereal. It is right here on earth. It has to hold it all. It just has to. Because we can't. God is gritty out here. We don't have a common verbal language. It comes right down to the body. Hear a story and understand it from the heart, not the head. Because that is the only choice we have in that moment. Hold a hand. Smile. Cry. Laugh. Love. Sing. Rock. Dance. The world suffers. It laughs. And something that I call God holds it. I am alive. And because of that simple fact, life is beautiful. I get to be here. We get to be here. We are the hands and feet of God. What is beauty? Being alive to experience it all. Being alive to experience it all. God be with us. I know You are.
 I am not I
I am not I.
 I am this one
Walking beside me whom I do not see,
Whom at times I manage to visit,
 And whom at other times I forget;
 The one who remains silence when I talk,
 The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
 The one who takes a walk where I am not,
 The one who will remain standing when I die.
Juan Ramon Jimenez/Robert Bly
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| Posted by Jenny Finn at | | | |
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A young woman came to me today needing direction home. She wanted back into the heart within her. She had traveled far from home, like we do, and longed for the sturdiness and sustainability of her soul. When we travel far from home, we long to come back. Meister Eckhart, Christian mystic, says that God does not go out for walks, we do. When I go for a walk it is usually to sugar, people or my vanity. I start relating my self worth to the size of my butt, the thickness of my hair, clarity of my skin, Andy's mood and if he is fond of me that day, or a big thick fudge brownie. I forget that I am beloved. I forget that the only way to define myself is to remember that I am beloved. That I am loved no matter what.
So, this precious young woman and I talked. I just reminded her of what she already knew. Then a story of straw and brick came to me. Coming home to our belovedness, does not mean feeling good all of the time. It means building the home of our heart out of brick, not straw. When I feel afraid, or lonely, or bored, I want the safety of a brick home, not a thin straw house where I can get cold. I want a solid door and windows to see out of. And a path made out of stone. And we do not need to build these sturdy homes alone. We need help building our brick houses. We need a spiritual practice that reminds us that we need bricks, rather than straw or things that blow away; we need other bricklayers to help us in our building; we need to to remember that by building the brick house, we teach others to do the same for themselves; and know and remember that being human means we are always building. But as we build, let us take the time to feel the safety of the walls of our hearts. Kind of like a turtle. It is soft and mushy inside, because it has protection. Vulnerability loves a good brick house that it can go in and out of. Like Parker Palmer, author and inspiration says, the soul is like a wild animal. It won't come out when we are searching desperately for it, and pounding around in the brush. We need to be quiet, so it knows it is safe to come out. Quiet is like the mortar holding the bricks together. Quiet is important. How can we hear direction from our heart on how to build our house if we don't listen?
Then, this young woman and I got up and danced; laying bricks for our foundation. Sometimes that is the hardest part. Stepping out and doing things differently. I saw a smile spread across her face. It was a smile of I am going to be okay. I know that safety when I see it. It came straight up from her beautiful heart. It comes from having a home to feel safe in, no matter what we feel.
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| Posted by Jenny Finn at | | | |
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Such love does
the sky now pour,
that whenever I stand in a field,
I have to wring out the light
when I get
home.
St. Francis
Lights were falling from the sky in Shanghai. I was walking the Bund, or the long stone walkway along the river, and I spotted many red lights in the sky. Andy thought China was having some kind of air traffic control problem. I stood arm in arm with Maddy, one of the children from the ship, as my mouth hung open trying to figure out what the heck was going on. Something in me felt excited. A Chinese man came running over with a red paper circle covered in. Pointing at it, and then to the sky, furiously he asked, "Would you like one?
Oh my God, they are lights. THEY ARE LIGHTS FLYING THROUGH THE DARKNESS. Those of you who know me, know I could just about pee my pants over this discovery. I sat there while throngs of people began to surround us trying to sell us everything from paper lanterns to small colorful plastic tigers that moved around when you pressed a button (it is the year of the tiger in the Chinese new year that is being celebrated right now!) . The group I was with scurried us along, but I watched those lights the entire cab ride back to the ship. I stood out on the deck every night and watched these little lights rise.
So, after we arrived on the ship, I needed to work a bit during disembarkation. And when I returned to our room to shower my dirty body and lay my head down to sleep, I found this on my bed.
A red paper lantern. Believe it or not, Andy headed up to the 7th deck before our departure and a big red lantern was sitting there, right on deck 7. It landed on our ship. I must have asked Andy five million times if he was kidding. He wasn't. He found a red paper lantern on our ship and put it on our bed for me. God is funny; leaving little lanterns for me along the way. Reminding me that there is always light. No matter what. And this time, it was actually one I could touch.
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| Posted by Jenny Finn at | | | |
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Everything I see, hear, touch, feel, taste
speak, think,
imagine
is completing a perfect circle God
has drawn.
Meister Eckhart
Once upon a time I went to China and I ate....
Stewed Eggplant
A nut fruit bar from a street vendor that was a work of art
Buns that taste like marshmellows
A little duck head for dinner
A cup of chrysanthemum flower, gobi tea
and a little ice cream in a cab
Simply divine..
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| Posted by Jenny Finn at | | | |
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When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
That I must dance and I must sing
For I am blessed by everything.
Everything I look upon is blessed.
William Butler Yeats
When I look into people's eyes, I see beauty. Here is some beauty I have encountered along the way...
In a Tokyo train station
Atsaka and Matsaku from the Orina Cafe in Kamakura, holding a peace stone that I gave to her. And Atsaka gave the origami cicada to Lizzie
A sushi restaurant outside of Tokyo with Andy's childhood friend Andrew and his wife Yin
In a coffee shop in Kobe, a group of high school students invited Lizzie and Andrew over to their table as the did calligraphy
Mike, who lives in a town outside of Kobe, who we couch surfed with and who we affectionately call "Asian Mikey". We met a new friend in Asian Mikey.
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| Posted by Jenny Finn at | | | |
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Have you ever seen a Fu Dog? What even is a Fu Dog? In very simple terms, the Fu Dog is a protector. They protect the temple, the sacred ground. They protect the feminine. And they live within us. They protect that soft space within us. They protect the heart. It's like the moat that protects the castle. Or the snake that guards the treasure. There is a fu dog that guards that love within us. In Kobe, Japan, we wandered through the streets aimlessly for hours on a chilly afternoon. We found ourselves at the foot of the steps to a Shinto shrine. And when I looked up, the fierce Fu Dog looked me straight in the eye. I could almost here him say, "Don't mess with this place. It is sacred."
Who messes with the sacred in us? Sometimes it is the "people out there", but often it is us, our very selves. We speak messages to ourselves like, I am not good enough. I don't have good hair. I am not as accomplished as she is. We desecrate the sacred within us. And it is up to us to reclaim what is precious to us. It is up to us to reclaim our hearts.
Yesterday was Valentine's Day and we danced. We learned lessons from our bodies about our hearts. The lesson was simple and it was pure. Home is where the heart is. And it is with us always. We just need to take the time and practice to reconnect to it and learn new messages of beauty. The invisible world within us is precious. It
is a treasure within us that whispers the language of love to us. When
we listen, we hear nothing but you are loved. That is always the first
message of the heart. There is power in this vulnerability. It is subtle and when it rises, it
is alchemy. The more we do, the less we doubt our belovedness, and the more fully we live in the world.
Each morning, down the hall from me, two students write a "quote for the day", and I look forward to reading it each day as I head to eat breakfast. Here is what I saw today. And my heart filled up and not unlike the Grinch, grew two sizes.
Protect your sacred self. Mother yourself. And live from your beauty. And most of all, honor your heart today, on the day of St. Valentine.
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| Posted by Jenny Finn at | | | |
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We danced last night. Over one hundred sweaty bodies moving through space. In the middle of the dance, the energy pumping, feet moving, the music completely stopped. As a teacher, I now learn to breathe into these moments. As I breathe there is a slight anxiety. The anxiety comes from things not going as I had planned. When things don’t happen how I plan them, both on and off the dance floor, my prayer is my breath. And as I breathe, I slowly begin to trust. So, when the music stopped abruptly last night, and I began to trust, I watched in awe as the moment took over. The students started stomping, clapping, singing, and did not miss a beat. And when the music picked up again, we just kept on going. After the dance, we stayed together for a while. Some massaged each others backs, others inquired about what the heck I do in Colorado Springs, and others said, how can I follow my heart. They said, I do not want to just work to make money, or to get on top. I want to do what I love. With the biggest light, the light that burns in each and every one of us, I shined back that it was totally possible to do what they loved. In fact, it is their birthright. It is what they came here for.
We have come to be danced
Where the kingdom’s collide
In the cathedral of flesh
To burn back into the light
To unravel, to play, to fly, to pray
To root in skin sanctuary
We have come to be danced
We have come.
by Jewel Mathieson
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| Posted by Jenny Finn at | | | |
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