By Anna Blaedel
I believe in mystery.
I believe in magic.
I believe in miracles.*
I believe in intuition. I believe Spirit seeks connection, through stars and trees and soil and flesh and beauty blooming and every movement of freedom and mobilization toward liberation.
I believe divinity is moments of felt connection, resonances that spark and open into Wisdom.
For a few years, I’ve been keeping a list of words my phone auto-miscorrents, that spark some strange wonder, or amusement. I love how these slips invite me to trace and imagine interconnections I might otherwise miss. Between, for example, “sacred” and “scared,” or “holy” and “hold,” or “safe” and “sage.”
I often think “smart” technology is more of a barrier to Wisdom than an enabler of it, but I love love love how my phone invites me to seek safety in sage. Sage, as in wisdom. Sage, as in elders. Sage, as in salvia, the largest genus of plants in the sage family.
A few years ago, I built a garden bed of cedar, a holy, holding place for herbs, and other healing plants. The garden sage I planted that first year has grown strong roots, now overwintering even in Iowa. That sage is blooming right now, beautiful blue-purple flowers that draw bees and, just yesterday, the first hummingbird I’ve seen this spring. Sage is salvia. Salve, healing. Salvation, healing, liberation.
In Portuguese, the word for hummingbird is “beija-flor,” or “flower kisser.” There are over 700 species of salvia growing across this planet; there are almost 340 species of flower kissers. From deserts that rest below sea level to tropical forests reaching elevations up to 16,000 feet, there are flower kissers seeking out the beauty and sweetness of salvia, and also sage rooting down and blooming out, seeking a hummingbird’s kiss.
“It is not only the thirsting who seek water; it is water that also seeks the thirsty,” whispered that sacred sage mystic poet, Rumi.
I believe healing is the most sacred, beautiful work we can do.
I believe in the practice of seeking the sacred beauty of and in this world; I believe the sacred beauty of and in this world makes it a practice to seek us, too.
During a recent meditation on healing and repair, Jacoby Ballard offered the wisdom that righting our relationships – with ourselves, each other, the earth, the plants and creatures who kiss them – is a practice of cleaning up the destruction caused by harm. Jacoby was teaching about ahimsa, one of the five yamas, or ethical guidelines practiced through yoga. Ahimsa is the principle of non-violence, or non-harm. Violence and harm destroy connection; ahimsa is a practiced commitment toward righting, restoring, repairing, and repatterning relationships toward healing. We cannot discern and practice ahimsa without paying attention to himsa, or harm. Himsa–untended, unacknowledged–spreads and grows. Ahimsa disrupts himsa; healing, too, spreads and grows.
As a prayerpoemspell, adrienne maree brown writes:
“i know all of the harm intertwines at the root
i know the medicine has to go deeper down
to the core of existence
to the chores between us and god
to the fault lines between us
that make us think: i can be without you”
I cannot think about himsa and harm without thinking about Hizma, an occupied Palestinian village. Hizma is located in what is today known as the West Bank, a Palestinian territory that has been under Israeli occupation since 1967. The people of Hizma have lived under endless routine harassment, land expropriation, and home demolition orders by the IDF and Israeli police, as well as extremist Israeli settlers, for decades, generations. Hizma is cut off from Jerusalem by the separation wall built in 2005. Hizma is known for the olives and olive trees that love to grow there. In June of 2023, Israeli forces uprooted 50 olive trees in Hizma, with no intention beyond destruction, harm for the sake of harm, violence for the sake of proving power, and stoking fear.
Thomas Merton, whose mysticism compelled him to fight in resistance to the Vietnam War, wrote, “If you want to know me…ask me what I live for, in every detail, and ask me what in my view prevents me from living fully for the thing I really want to live for.”
“In the United States, we are currently living in a fascist country,” Lama Rod Owens teaches. “If your spiritual practice, be it meditation, yoga, magic, ceremony, or ritual doesn’t help you to acknowledge this, and thus respond in a way to disrupt fascism, then you are practicing spiritual bypassing. If that is the case, then you are actually supporting the rise of fascism.”
Where, and how, might you practice ahimsa, to disrupt the himsa of rising fascism, of justification of genocide, of anti-trans malevolence, of militarized policing?
I believe there is magic, there, even if it is yet a mystery. A miracle, too, of healing that wants to grow and bloom, waiting for your, for our, kiss.
*inspired by our sacred incantation: ‘you are mystery, you are miracle, you are magic’ order the whole deck here.
Anna Blaedel (they/them) is co-director and co-founder at enfleshed, where they tend to the theopoetic intersections of spiritual, academic, and activist engagement. Anna chaplains University of Iowa students, and is a doctoral candidate in Theological and Philosophical Studies at Drew University’s Graduate Division on Religion. Waking before dawn, lingering in poetry, being an aunt, retreating to the woods or their basement woodshop, tending the garden, sharing silence, and feeding people delicious food are some of Anna’s favorite things.