A blessing for myself, my friends and my world sustains me where there is nothing else to hold me. In a few days I will start my next lap around the sun on this little blue dot. It has been a year like no other. There are literally no words adequate to describe the process of pain, healing, reclamation, confusion, sadness, disappointment, celebration, loss. despair, relocation, affirmation …. processes have collided, subsided and arrived in gentle waves and in tsunamis.
This trip around the sun is one I had planned as a jubilee year, because my 50th which should have been a jubilee begun with devastating news of my love’s life limiting illness and I needed to prepare for being the sole bread-winner and calibrate my life around what was ahead. We thought it was going to be a sprint and yet it was a marathon, ending as my 59th year started. Jubilee is meant to be a time of celebration, harvest and letting the land lie fallow. In this biblical tradition it is the time when slaves and prisoners are set free, debts forgiven, and mercies of God manifest. Forgiveness is a pre-requisite for freedom. Mercy comes from the French for thank you which is hard to accept when the gifts and invitations to forgive are consequences of breaches of trust. These are the sunk costs of relationships, the decisions made in good faith for good reasons and gifted with generosity – all good decisions although they didn’t end up necessarily with a good outcome.
In the Longtime Sun blessing, usually sung three times, the first time is for your self. Your Self and it is a blessing of Self Compassion. We are stardust – united in time and space, created literally in the heat of the moment, some kind of cosmic love unfolding in points of light made visible in our life force. We embody the blessing and wait for guidance, to be shown the way forward. This blessing is my go-to when I have nothing else to give or receive. It brings me back to my essence and invites me to turn inward and outward with equal measure to the Uni-verse – the one voice – calling me to love and light, calling out my love and light and in being shone upon empowered to shine for myself first.
Long Time Sun
May the long time sun
Shine upon you
All love surround you
And the pure light
Within you
Guide your way on
Guide your way on
Woodstock
I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him where are you going
And this he told me
I’m going on down to Yasgur’s farm
I’m going to join in a rock ‘n’ roll band
I’m going to camp out on the land
I’m going to try an’ get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it’s the time of man
I don’t know who I am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil’s bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
back to the garden
© 1969; Siquomb Publishing Company

Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash
Happy Birthday Moira and thanks again for writing so candidly and beautifully. I am an absolute Joni fan as well and have often found solace or inspiration or just plain enjoyment in her music. Saw her once when she performed at the Adelaide Festival Centre in 1983 – were you there? She missed Woodstock as you no doubt know in spite of writing so evocatively about it. What a good idea it is to have a year of self compassion and perhaps it should be ongoing as we are always so hard on ourselves. Did you study Gestalt Therapy as part of your social work degree? I loved it although I never was a practitioner in it. The thing I still carry with me about it is the notion of accepting our whole selves which are made up of everything that we have done, including the ‘bad’. When my mind goes back to an occasion on which I wish I could have been better, I remember that all those experiences are part of the person I am and I try to accept myself anew. It’s quite comforting. Hope your day is very special as you are. Christine x
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Thank you Christine for those good wishes and kind words! I didn’t do any gestalt work in social work, but my 1st degree I majored in psychology and do know a little about gestalt, thanks for reminding me about that approach.