Grounding Meditation: The Names We Carry

For the Spiritual Feast, November 1, 2026

For the reader: Speak slowly, with a spacious quality, as if you have all the time in the world. Pause generously between paragraphs. Approximately 5–6 minutes.

[Settling into presence]

Everything offered in this grounding is an invitation. Please engage in whatever way feels right to you. You are the sacred steward of your own experience.

Let's begin right here. With whatever this evening brings, your tiredness or your energy, your fullness or your grief.

Feel the contact between your body and what holds you, perhaps your chair, the floor beneath your feet, the weight of your own hands in your lap.

If connecting with your body feels difficult today, you might bring awareness to your surroundings instead, the quality of the light as the day turns toward dark, the sounds near or far, or simply the sense of being present in a particular place at a particular moment.

[The exhale]

Now, I invite you to notice your breath, just as it is, without changing anything.

And when you are ready, choose one long, slow exhale. Let it go a little longer than feels usual, as if you are setting something down.

Again, if you like. One long exhale.

If it feels good, rest a hand on your heart, or anywhere in your body that feels like home. Feel the warmth of your own hand. Let this be your anchor. You can return here at any time.

[At the threshold]

From this settled place, I invite you to imagine a doorway as evening comes on. Behind you, a warm room. Ahead of you, the dusk, and the first cool air of the dark half of the year.

This is your threshold. You decide who comes near it. No one crosses without your welcome.

You might sense the presence of someone who came before you. Someone of your blood. Someone of your spirit, a teacher, a friend, an elder you chose. Someone of story, from a book, a song, a tradition that shaped you. Or the land itself, the stones and trees and waters that held the people before you.

You may invite one. You may invite none. You may simply stand at the door and enjoy the evening air. All of it is welcome.

[Receiving]

If someone has come near, notice how they arrive. Don't reach for them. Let them find you, the way a familiar scent finds you before you know what it is.

Perhaps a feeling of warmth. A word. An image. Or only a quiet sense of company. Notice where in your body you feel their nearness. There is nothing you need to do with it.

If anything arises that feels unwelcome or too tender, you can close the door gently. Return to your breath, your hand on your heart, the ground beneath you. You are always free to choose.

[A name]

Now, if you wish, let a name come to you.

It might be a name you were told, the name of someone you love, or a name with no words at all, a feeling, a place, a color. You might whisper it silently to yourself.

Or you might try these words, and let the rest of the sentence arrive in its own time: I come from…

I am a child of…

Breathe with whatever came. Or with the quiet, if nothing did. The quiet belongs here too.

[What we carry]

In your mind's eye, I invite you to see something small resting in your hands. A gift from the ones before you. It might be a recipe, a stubbornness, a song, a way of laughing.

Hold it for a moment. Feel its weight, its warmth.

And if there is something you notice that you have received, maybe just now, or perhaps a long time ago, if you are ready to set this down, If something was handed to you that you no longer wish to carry, you may lay it on the threshold. You don't need to know yet where it will go. For now, you can simply set it down.

One more long exhale.

[Returning]

When you are ready, thank whoever stood with you, in whatever way feels right. Let the door rest as it is, open or closed.

Begin to return more fully. Wiggle your fingers, roll your shoulders, take a slightly fuller breath. Notice the light in your space. The presence of others. This circle, this evening, this now.

You carry your names. And right now, you are here.

Homily: What Is Remembered Lives

Prepared for the Spiritual Feast on 2026-11-01

Tonight the wheel is turning into the dark half of the year. In many places, early November belongs to the dead. Medieval Irish tales tell of Samhain as the night the doors of the Otherworld stand open. The church gave this season All Saints and All Souls. In Mexico, families build ofrendas with marigolds and photographs for Día de los Muertos.

In my circles we say the veil is thin at this time of year. This is our poetry, not an archaeologist's finding. But poetry is how people have always spoken of the dead. And tonight, poetry will do. The veil is thin. We are between the worlds. 

Many Samhain rituals I've attended have a doorway ritual. A ritual where you are asked who asks to enter into the circle. Your answer is to name something about yourself and your ancestors. When asked, my answer has changed from year to year. But often I will say something along the lines of Amy, child of Anne, child of Laura, child of Mabel, inheritor of expansive imagination and inheritor of pride. Sometimes I might say Amy, granddaughter of Laura who persevered and granddaughter of Lillie who loved. Sometimes, though, I might answer Amy, great-grandchild of immigrants, great-great-great-grandchild of survivors, descendant of farmers and teachers and thieves and colonizers and healers. Sometimes I would answer, Amy, child of Oregon's mossy pine-scented air and child of North Carolina Morning Glories, granddaughter of New York strawberry fields full of rocks, and great-granddaughter of New York City hustle and bustle.

What is remembered lives

Many Pagan Samhain rituals, especially in Reclaiming circles, use the phrase: What is remembered lives.

The anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, writing about elderly Jewish immigrants in California, had a word for this: re-membering. Gathering the members of a life back together. Spiritual companion Michelle Dyett-Welcome takes up the same word in this summer's Presence article: to name is to remember, and to remember is to re-member, to become more whole.

So tonight we name and we remember and we re-member. But naming is not neutral. Who we name, and how, shapes who we become.

Not every ancestor is a saint

Our family trees hold the harmed and the harmers, sometimes on the same branch. Some of us descend from people who survived terrible things. Some of us descend from people who did terrible things. Many of us descend from both.

Ancestor work does not ask us to revere everyone. Not worship. But relationship. Relationship we can do.

And as we said in an August Spiritual Feast, relationship comes by consent, not by right. You do not owe your doorway to everyone who shares your blood. You may welcome the great-aunt who fed the whole street during hard years. You may close the door on the one who did harm, and you can do it without guilt.

You may also welcome ancestors you chose. The teacher who saw you. The queer elders who made a way. The writers whose words got you through. And ancestors of place: Ada Limón, in her poem "Ancestors", traces herself back to stones and oaks and redwoods. For anyone whose family line is painful, broken, or simply unknown, that is a real lineage too.

Legacies of care

Care travels down the generations. Sometimes it comes as a recipe. Sometimes as a song, a stubbornness, a way of sitting with the dying. Sometimes it comes in fragments. A word in a language no one speaks anymore. My friend whose grandfather came to the USA from the Azores uses a word to describe anxious leg twitching: "goonyadas". Now that I'm in Portugal and learning Portuguese, I realize something even she didn't know! She was using the Portuguese word "agoniadas". Maybe a ritual whose meaning got lost along the way. Poppyseed buns with frosting on a Christmas morning are a remembering of my great-grandmother Ana, who learned the recipe from her Slovakian mother.

We are allowed to build on fragments. Every living tradition is built on them. We take what reached us, we tend it, and we let it grow in our own hands.

Legacies of harm

Harm travels too. Not mainly through blood. But through stories and silences. Through habits learned at the kitchen table. Through laws, property deeds, and who got to keep the land. Remember my Slovakian great-grandmother, Ana? She always mourned losing track of her younger sister who had to be left behind the Iron Curtain because she would not have survived the sea voyage to the Americas, back at the turn of the century. A legacy of a family who had to make impossible decisions that left a mark of pain through the generations.

And here I want to be careful with a word, the word heal. Inner healing is real work, and holy work. But some of what we inherit cannot be healed from the inside alone. A stolen acre is not returned by meditation. A silence in a family is not broken by journaling about it, though journaling may help us find the courage to speak.

So tonight, I'd offer a different word. Not absolution. But accountability: repair. Repair happens in the lived world. It means telling the truth about where we come from. It means giving something back. It means supporting the descendants of people our ancestors harmed, in the ways they ask for, not the ways that make us feel better.

We don't do this because we're sure it will fix everything. Much of it won't be fixed in our lifetimes. We do it because we have chosen to be faithful. Faithful to the dead who deserved better. Faithful to the living who still carry the past.

We are becoming ancestors

One day, someone will speak our names. Or they won't.

We get some say in what we hand on. Some of us have said, out loud or silently, this ends with me. The drinking. The violence. The contempt. The silence.

That is a powerful vow. It is also a costly one. Ending a legacy can mean distance from family. It can mean grief for the people we hoped they'd become. It can mean being misunderstood by the very people we are trying to protect.

And sometimes a legacy doesn't end with us. Sometimes we only carry it a little more lightly, and hand it on with a note attached: Here is what I learned. Here is where it still hurts. I have repaired what I can. Do better than I could.

That counts. That is ancestor work too.

So whether you are lifting up and expanding a gift passed down to you, attempting to redeem a complex legacy or to repair a wrong. However you name your dead is a choice you make. Your boundaries, your consent, and your work. And therefore, also your transformation, your survival, your delight, and your love. 

Blessing

As we gather at this threshold, with the dark coming on:

May you speak the names that nourish you.

May you close the door where you need to, and keep your peace.

May you carry the good gifts forward, and let the rest end with you, even when that ending costs you.

May you remember with honesty, and be remembered with love.

And may the ones who come after us say: They did not fix everything. But they were faithful to the work that was laid before them.

Blessed be.

Homily: Off-Script

Off-Script: Living the Stages You Choose
Homily for October 4

Jaques has it all worked out. "All the world's a stage," he says, "and all the men and women merely players." Then come the seven ages: infant mewling, whining schoolboy, sighing lover, quarrelsome soldier, well-fed justice, the lean and slippered pantaloon, and at last "second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

It's a tidy speech. It's also a script. And notice who's talking: Jaques, the melancholy one, who finds a sermon in everything and joy in almost nothing. He watches life from the edge of the stage and mistakes the watching for wisdom. He has decided how your play goes before you've spoken a line.

Most of us were handed a script like his before we could read it. Crawl, walk, talk, right on schedule. School, then more school. A career by this age, a partner by that one, children in the window between, a house, a peak, a retirement, and then the long slippered decline Jaques promises. We call these "milestones," as though they were carved in stone by the road, and not painted there, recently, by someone with an interest in where we're headed.

Whose clock?

Sociologists have a name for the thing pressing on you when you feel behind: the social clock. Bernice Neugarten described it sixty years ago: the shared, mostly invisible sense of what we ought to have done by now, and the low hum of anxiety when our own life runs early or late. Erik Erikson gave us eight tidy stages, each with a task to master before we're allowed up to the next. These aren't lies. They describe something real about how many lives unfold. But they were written in a particular time and place, by a culture that pictures a life as a staircase, always climbing, and old age as the top step before the fall.

That ladder is one culture's drawing of a life. It is not the only one, and it is not the truth. Other ways of perceiving hold time as a circle, a spiral, a web of relationships rather than a stairway of achievements. And the moment you notice the ladder is a drawing, something loosens. You can step off the stairs.

The unruly ones

We love our unruly elders. The raging granny with a protest sign. The woman in the red hat that doesn't suit her, delighted that it doesn't. The reclaimed crone. The curmudgeon who has run clean out of patience for nonsense. The elder who cries at anything tender. We love them because they've stopped performing. They say the true thing, wear the loud thing, rest when they're tired, love how they love, and ask no one's permission.

Here's what's easy to miss: almost none of them arrived there by accident. Jenny Joseph's famous poem, the one that gave the Red Hat Society its purple and red, isn't really about being old. Its line, at the very end, is that perhaps she'd better practice being outrageous now, so the people who know her aren't too shocked when she's suddenly old and does it for real. The unruly elder is a rehearsed role. Freedom is a muscle. It is built early, it is built now.

Off-script is not no script

Let me level with you, because this real talk, not a pep talk. Going off-script is neither free nor simple. Some of us cannot just dance off the ladder. Bodies, money, the care of children or parents, real obligations, real danger for those whose very existence is already treated as "out of order." "Just live authentically" is easy to say from a comfortable seat.

So I'm not asking you to burn the script. I'm asking a gentler thing: to notice that you are holding one, to notice whose handwriting it's in, and to take up the pen where you can. Off-script doesn't mean chaos. It means authorship: the difference between a life that merely happens to you on someone else's timeline and one you are, even a little, consenting to. You are the sacred steward of your own experience. That is as true of your calendar as of your prayers.

What are you rehearsing?

So this is not, in the end, a homily about honoring old people, though we should. It isn't only for those with grey in their hair. Every one of us here, at whatever age, is aging right now, rehearsing (on purpose or by accident) the person we are becoming. The twenty-year-old and the eighty-year-old are in the same play. The only question is whether you stick to the script.

So I leave you with the question the unruly elder answers with their whole body: what freedom are you practicing today? What small "no," what postponed delight, what unruliness or tenderness will you try on now, not when you're finally old enough, not before you're too old, but today, off-script, on no one's clock but your own?

Jaques was wrong about the most important thing. We are not merely players. We can pick up the pen. Not all of us can rewrite the whole page, and some of us are carrying more than any one person should have to hold. But wherever your hand is free, even a little, the pen is yours. Pick it up where you can.

Grounding: Going Off Script

Grounding

Prepared for “OffScript” spiritual feast on 10/04/26
For the reader: Speak slowly and warmly. Let the pauses be longer than feels comfortable. Trust the silence. Roughly 6 minutes.

Everything here is an invitation. Take up only what serves you, and let the rest go by. You are the sacred steward of your own experience.

So, let's arrive. Just as you are. At whatever age you are today, in whatever mood came with you. Nothing to reach for. Nowhere further along to be.

[pause]

Let yourself be held. By the chair, the floor, the air, this moment. If it's easy, let your eyes close. If it isn't, let them rest soft on something near.

[pause]

Somewhere in you, breath is moving. It has never once asked whether you were on time.

And underneath it, a heartbeat, steady through every deadline you've ever been handed, every milestone you met early, or late, or not at all. It kept its own time the whole way.

If it feels welcome, you might bring a hand to rest over your heart, and simply let that steady timekeeper be met.

[longer pause]

There is a part of you like that. Older than any schedule. It was there before you were told to hurry and grow up. There's a part of you like that. Younger than any schedule. It will be there long after someone decides you're too old for this or that. You don't have to find it. Just let it be near.

[pause]

And if there's a timeline you've been carrying... a story about... "by now I should have", the story that... "it's too late", the story... "I'm too old"... you don't have to argue with it right now. You might just set the timeline down for a moment. Right here on the floor beside you. Let one slow breath out, and set the timeline down on the exhale. It'll keep. You can pick it back up later, if you still want it.

[longer pause]

Rest in what's left when you put it down.

[pause]

And if anything grows heavy, come back to the simple things: the breath, the weight of you right where you are, the ground that's holding all of it. You are held.

[pause]

Somewhere ahead of you there's a version of you who has stopped apologizing. Who says the true thing, wears the bright thing, rests when tired, loves how they love. You don't have to become them today. You might just let them wave to you from up ahead.

[pause]

And just for a moment, you might let a little of their freedom be yours. Not someday. Now. A small loosening somewhere. The shoulders dropping an inch. A quiet yes, or a quieter no. One true thing, tried on in the body, the way you try a key you half expect to fit.

[longer pause]

However that landed, or didn't, is alright. You tried on a garment on and you can try it on again, or leave it where it is. You tasted this flavor of nourishment. Nothing more is asked of you.

[pause]

When you're ready, no hurry, come gently back. To your body, your breath, this room. To the others gathered here, each of us aging, right now, toward a self we haven't yet met.

Welcome. You're here. That's enough.