Sabbath Space

I worked in the garden "for just an hour" last night and my arm is rebelling! Everything I do involves my right arm! I realize that I cannot manage two gardens and will use my garden budget to hire someone! Bastyr has a student clinic that has affordable acupuncture for those unemployed like myself. So I will get a chi transfusion. My deep "connective tissues" and negative space will get some much needed "oxygen." I love my life and have so many great things to do...I resist slowing down. My body is more intelligent than this over driven person and is a constant teacher. Thank you!


I hope to do a Poetry Wheel series in July that addresses the oil spill. Here are two poems that I will recite:

Imagine a place without a pipeline,
Without an oil well,
Without a rig.
Imagine a place without a coal pit,
Without a smoke stack,
Acid rain free.

Imagine a land of long white vistas,
Ice cold saviours,
Gleaming glaciers,
Breaking into the sea.
Imagine the Earth without an oil slike,
Free of pollution,
No radioactivity.

Imagine a place on Earth so awesome,
So vast so pure,
We can hardly breathe its air.
Imagine the Earth alive with morning,
Shimmering white nights,
No end of sky
No end of sea.

Carole Forman, “Antartica”



We who have lost our sense and our senses—our touch, our smell, our vision of who we are, we who frantically force and press all things, without rest for body or spirit, hurting our earth and injuring ourselves: we call a halt.

We want to rest. We need to rest and allow the earth to rest. We need to reflect and to rediscover the mystery that lives in us, that is the ground of every unique expression of life, the source of the fascination that call all things to communion.

We declare a Sabbath, a space of quiet for simply being and letting be; for recovering the great, forgotten truths; for learning how to live again.

U.N. Environmental Sabbath Program