"transitions and leaving..."

"You're lovely
even with your scars;
lovely just the way you are.

So open up your lovely heart,
don't try so hard..."

Sometimes, I can read something that touches a nerve so deep it drives me to my knees -- or to laying my head in my arms and just weeping.

My friend - and much-admired women's historian - Sally Roesch Wagner, posted a piece at the end of the summer about "leaving the lake" in which she writes:

“You must be leaving soon,” my daughter observed. “Yes, why do you say that?” “Because you just picked a fight with me.”

It was one of those golden moments when intimacy mirrors deep truths about yourself. I pick fights when I leave. “I don’t love you anymore,” “You suck,” “I don’t even like you.”

I’m in a fight with the lake right now. Stupid lake. It’s overcast and cold and gloomy and I’m mad at it. Because tomorrow morning I will leave it for another year.

Recognizing my pattern, owning it, the dam bursts and I am crying sad because I will miss this lake I love with all the 72 years my body has known her.
 

That is me. Or at least it has been me for most of my life. A family member once said, "It's not worth coming to visit you unless I can stay for 10 days. It takes you 3 days to open up, and three days to prepare for my leaving. You pick fights or look for ways to isolate yourself days before I have to depart."

She was right. I know this about myself. God bless my husband for knowing that "comings and goings" are hard for me. Whether I am going away, or he is, he knows enough to carve out space in our home for those transitions -- from being together, to being alone, to being together again.  He gives me space to grieve.  And for some reason, it is a grieving for me -- and  I have to process it each time.

So, obviously these feelings are not new for me. But seeing someone that I admire so much, willing to actually own that pattern of emotional fragility herself, was somehow heart-fissuring for me. I wasn't alone. Something of the brittleness in me -- about how I see myself -- started to yield its hardness. I could look at myself through the lens of self-compassion.

I love that God brings those wiser guides into our lives to help us through the labyrinth of self-acceptance. Sally's insight about her own sorrow when "leaving the lake," gave me permission to begin to look more deeply at my own grief about transitions.

Sometimes, I try too hard. I don't "do" some things -- like entering a crowded room -- with ease. I tend to need a job, a role, a name badge that says, "hi, I am Cate and I am here in this role..." to navigate those situations. Just walking in and finding my "tribe," is terrifying for me. But knowing that I am not alone, and that there just might be someone else in the "room" -- or in the world -- that is feeling just as awkward, takes my focus off of my own awkwardness.  It makes me look for her (or him) when I enter that room, so that I can try and make it easier for them too.

Amy Grant's "Don't Try So Hard," is like a friend looking me in the eye and saying -- "you've got this." Sally's post about "leaving the lake" will now join Amy's song like a big sister who puts her arm through mine and guides me forward, saying -- all the way, "I'm here, we can do this - together."  We can do this, because we have a God who loves us and has sent us into each other's lives as angels of mercy and compassion. Whether it's in a song, a moment of self-reflection shared with a reader, or just a smile across a crowded room.

If there is some way I can "be there" for you -- please let me know.

This blog is here to remind us all that, "we are not alone."

offered with Love,

Kate

"the third side..."

"When the soul
lies down in that grass,
the world is too full
to talk about..."

David Wilcox and Nancy Petit's, "Out Beyond Ideas,"  gives musical form to the poet Rumi's profound invitation that we meet him in the field where healing and understanding take root and bear fruit.

This morning my loved friend Ginny Nilsen shared this passage from an essay "Through My Enemy's Eyes" [A Journal of Positive Futures - Winter 2002.] It touches so beautifully on this "place" that is so critical to spiritual healing:

"Inmate proposes alternative to dualistic thinking:

Prison inmate and former prison-rights activist Troy Chapman, sentenced at the age of 21 to life in prison, discusses what he calls "the third side":

"I had spent most of my life splitting the world up into two sides, then fighting to defend one against the other. It was a game in which there were strategies, a clear objective, a field of play, and an opponent.

The poet Rumi pointed to something beyond this game when he said,

'Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing there is a field. I'll meet you there.'

"When I began to see myself in other -— even in my enemies -— I found myself heading for Rumi's field. Here the game is not a game. No one wins unless and until everyone wins. The line between victim and perpetrator no longer runs between 'I' and 'Other.' It now runs right through the center of my soul. I am both, as we are all both.

"What then is left to fight for? Where does an out-of-work activist go? Well, God is hiring and God is on the third side. Not the prisoner's side or the jailer's side. Not the Left or the Right.

"The third side is that little-represented side of healing. It's the side that cares as much about the enemy as the friend, that says love is the only justice, the only victory there is. It does not want anyone destroyed. It does not want to win if someone else must lose. It wants something much larger than winning and losing."

"Through my enemy's eyes"
Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures
Winter 2002”

Isn't this the "side" that Jesus advocated for. The place from which he wrote in the dust and urged self-righteous indignation to sit in the quiet field of self-examination and compassion.

Isn't this the only place from which he could have said [as reported in Luke's gospel]:

"love your enemies and do good,
and lend, hoping for nothing again.

for He is kind unto the unthankful,
and to the evil.

Be ye therefore merciful;
Judge not,
and ye shall not be judged;
Condemn not,
and ye shall not be condemned;
Forgive,
and ye shall be forgiven..."

To gather in this field of the third side, is to listen with the heart -- and to do so, without the filter of self-certainty and pre-judgment. It is to take off one's shoes and walk on holy ground.

My sister, Nancy Mullane, wrote a book titled, "Life After Murder: Five Men in Search of Redemption." In it she shares the journeys of five men who'd been found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. She tells their stories with a journalist's clear, unbiased voice.

I remember reading one man's chilling account of the crime that had led to his incarceration. Earlier, I had met this man at Nancy's book launch event -- after he had been released on parole. He was humble, thoughtful, and gracious. Reading his story, I felt myself take off my shoes and step into that field. I was beyond my own long-held preconceived notions of what kind of man would commit murder. I was willing to hear his story through the lens of his heart -- without bias or fear.

I also remember, so clearly, the tears I shed for that young man, who'd barely been an adult, when a robbery went horribly wrong. And the sudden realization that:

"There, but for the grace of God, go I...”

How many times had I lost my temper as a teenager fighting with my sister over a shared skirt or a missing shoe. How often had I lashed out, said something unkind, pinched, or even thrown a hair brush.  In those moments I was "out of control" -- willing to act on hair-trigger emotions. But I'd also had the privilege of access to books, counselors, and an extended family of spiritual resources for diffusing frustration and feelings of helplessness.

In this field beyond the ideas right and wrong-doing -- and who is on which side -- I felt a new sense of what it meant to have "an understanding heart." This understanding wasn't about figuring out the meaning of a spiritual text. It was about standing next to someone and looking at things from their point of view for the purpose of understanding where they were coming from -- without judgment or opinion. It was the feeling of their hand in yours and the pulse of your common humanity.  It was sharing the space of the third side.

I think Troy Chapman says it so well in the above essay:

"The third side is that little-represented side of healing.

It's the side that cares as much about the enemy 
as the friend, that says love is the only justice, 
the only victory there is.

It does not want anyone destroyed. It does not want to win
if someone else must lose. It wants something much larger
than winning and losing...”

It wants healing -- for one, and for all. It is the place where, as Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:

"Love is impartial and universal
in its adaptation and bestowals.”

I will meet you there.

offered with Love,

Kate

After reading this post, Ginny sent me a clip from Harry and Meghan's Royal Wedding with this performance of The Kingdom Choir singing "Stand By Me,"  let's stand by one another within the space of the third side.

"Love has the final move..."

"if paradise has
up and flown away for now,
but hope still breathes
and Truth is always true,
 just when we think
it's almost over,
Love has the final move..."

This summer has asked a lot of our humanity. I don't know about you, but I've slept little and questioned much. I can't help but wonder if Thomas Paine was just being historically accurate, or prophetically clear-eyed when he wrote: "These are the times that try men's souls." It certainly feels as if my soul - my spiritual senses -- have been deeply tried. Chris Rice's "Love Has the Final Move," soothed my heart one recent night as I lay in the dark praying for the world.

My prayers were not complex. They were not the unpacking of deep metaphysical premises. They didn't lead me to profound moments of realization. They were simple. "God, help me practice the two great commandments -- to love and trust You - supremely,  And to love my neighbor as myself."

But then my heart begged the age-old question: "But who is my neighbor?" And I remembered Jesus' answer to this question: the story of the good Samaritan. The neighbor was a stranger, a foreigner, someone whose customs and traditions were very different from those of the questioner. Well, I mused, no one could have more foreign ideas, customs, or rituals from my own, than an angry, torch-carrying neo-nazi, waving a swastika emblazoned flag, while spewing hateful rhetoric about racial supremacy. Yup, not my finest thinking.

"Dear God," I prayed, "please don't ask me to love them as myself." In other words, please don't ask me to love them in order to be my best self. But God said, "Isn't that what you have already been doing? Loving yourself in exact proportion to how you have been loving them." 

This wasn't going quite the way I'd expected.  But God persisted.  "You haven't been loving them, and you haven't been loving yourself very effectively. And since I am asking you to love them as you love yourself, it's important that you do that first.  But, you haven't been very kind to yourself. You have judged yourself based on your mistakes, your failures, your body fitness, your sense of being "less" in the world, your sense of what other people think of you."

He was right. It had been a hard summer. There were times when I'd felt awkward and small. I hadn't felt a clear sense of belonging. I felt like a square peg in a round hole. And I wasn't sure how something that had once felt so right, had come to feel so wrong. Had the square hole I'd thought I fit into -- so beautifully -- become round? Had I grown sharp edges, so that I no longer slipped effortlessly into the round, smooth hole?

Because I didn't know where I fit, I'd spent much of the summer holed up in my office, where I could focus on God -- letting my work singularly shape my sense of belonging.  It was wonderful, but I knew I couldn't stay sequestered forever.  The world was rightfully encroaching on my sublime isolation.  I had to find a way to expand my sense of loving others  -- as myself.  And this was much harder than I wanted it to be.

What I wanted was answers, I wanted a path to a solution, I wanted a way out of my own too-tight skin. Suddenly the conflicts and chaos I was praying about in far-away  Charlottesville, were really much, much closer. A small, awkward version of me was marching round the memorial I'd erected, and chanting in my head, "you will not replace us." Threatening the "me" that longed for a larger, more expansive sense of what it meant to love my neighbor as myself. It was no longer enough to feel good with (and about) those I shared a common hope -- my neighborhood was expanding.

So I held a rally within myself. The kind of rally I wanted to see happening in Charlottesville, Boston, San Francisco, and in my own community. I realized I needed to listen -- and to listen deeply, and attentively. All the doubts, hurt, fears, confusion, and anger needed to be seen, heard, and thoughtfully addressed.  I needed to lay down my weapons of self-certainty and be willing to hear something new.

For example, I had been feeling like I was no longer relevant - in my children's lives, in my friendships, in communities that I loved. 

First, I listened to the self-pitying logic that wanted to claim justification for this feeling. And then I was quiet. Really, really quiet.  I didn't just jump all over it with a slew of metaphysical quotes. I calmly looked at each of the suggestions and asked myself questions like: "Is this true? How do you know that it's true? Is it possible that it's not true? What would things look like if you didn't believe it were true? And if it is true, what are you willing to do to change it?"

I was respectful and considerate. I was not dismissive or reactive. I committed to loving myself.  Really loving myself.  Not only the me that I knew was the reflection of God, but I loved the me that felt buffeted by self-doubt.  The shift was remarkable. I wasn't afraid of my feelings. They were just feelings, they weren't necessarily facts. I could question them without feeling attacked for being less spiritual or less metaphysically "on top of it."

And more importantly, I felt real love for others the minute I started loving myself. I felt love for the journey that had brought me to this very moment of willingness, of deep self-examination.  I belonged here.  I was ready to grow from it.  And I was not alone in the uncertainty of it all.  

I also felt a genuine love for the girl in me -- the teen, woman, wife, mom, friend, healer, neighbor who had navigated this journey with courage -- day after day.  She'd made mistakes, but she was also bravely confronting those mistakes with humility and acceptance.  She was learning from those mistakes and that was all God was asking of her.

And in this loving of myself and my journey -- as full of missteps and blunders as it was -- I was able to love my neighbor and his/her journey -- no matter how little I understood of its history or its trajectory.  Regardless of how much I might not agree with the reasoning or decisions that got them there.  

Their journey was not mine to judge. It could only serve as an opportunity for me to learn to love more unconditionally.  I could learn to nurture my best self, by loving my neighbor -- regardless of the script, costume, props, or story that the ego was offering as right or wrong -- for either of us.  I could know that Love was/is working Her purpose out in every one of us.  

I began to see, I could trust that no matter how far gone the game seemed to be, Love would always have the final move -- in my life, in my neighbor's life, in my community, and in the world.  Love would always win.


offered with Love,

Kate

"he mus' know sumpin'..."

"...Ol' man river,
dat ol' man river
he mus' know sumpin',
but don't say nuthin'.
He jes' keeps rollin',
He keeps on rollin' along..."
Jerome Kerns

October, 2008.  "Obama Headquarters" the notation in my calendar reads. It makes me happy.  It is a beautiful day.  Campaign headquarters is about 5 blocks from our house and I love walking through the "old neighborhood."  It is a neighborhood that once heard the sounds of the 1904 St. Louis Worlds Fair,as they were happening...within earshot...just across Forest park.

I walk from our block filled with University housing and stately re-furbished turn-of-the-century brick homes, through less gentrified streets noisy with children playing and plastic flowers in peeling window boxes, to quieter blocks where men, who were once boys, sit on porch steps, and women who were once girls...fan themselves with folded paper, smooth the skirts of voluminous housedresses, and laugh from their place-in-the-shade just under the sloping roof of a once-grand porch. 

Songs like William Warfield's "Old Man River,"  Louis Armstrong's "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen," and Judy Garland's "Meet Me In St. Louis," provide the inner soundtrack for this loved journey through streets that I love.  I can't help but open my heart to the beauty of the day, the once-upon-a-time grandeur of what this neighborhood was, and the promise of the future. 

This is the poem that I found as a journal entry for that day:  

"I love this
neighborhood,"
I think,
as I walk
briskly
along
broken concrete
sidewalks
lifted and cracked
by the roots
of hundred year old
sycamores
planted for the
1904 World's Fair.
I am
on my way to
somewhere
else...
a place where
I have purpose,
somewhere
I am needed,
where I have
"things to do
and people to see"

The houses are
like
once-upon-a-time
grand dames
who still
show up in
boucle' suits and
pillbox hats
as ladies-who-lunch
and go for
martinis-at-5
but their
lipstick is
not as straight as
it once was,
and
orthopedic shoes
have replaced
open-toed
red pumps with ankle straps and
real silk
stockings with
seams up
the back.

He calls to me from a
crumbling stoop.

"Ma'am.."

A tip of his brown felt
fedora,
the other thumb looped
around a striped suspender,
his wing-tipped oxfords are polished
to a  spit-shine
a skill learned by many-a-soldier
in 1944.

"Sir,"
I cheerfully parry back, without
missing a beat in the
staccato of my late October
step...
I am happy.
I am
gaily skipping along
under leaves of gold and
scarlet filtering the
bright light of
an autum blue
sky.

"sweet tea?"
he returns.

"pardon?'

"sweet tea?"
he repeats, lifting a glass and a
round pitcher filled with
tea and ice and mint-leaves
floating on top
like
barges on the
Mississippi.

"i would...."
but I have places to go
and people to see.

I have a campaign to volunteer for.

why, we are going to elect the first
black man ever nominated, to be
the President of the United
States of America. 

"sweet tea?" he asks
again.

And I remember he is the man. 

"yes," I say, "that would be
lovely."

And he makes room for me on
his crumbling porch steps.

But first he pulls a pressed and
neatly folded handkerchief...from the pocket of
his white button down shirt, yellowed with age, but
perfectly starched and ironed...and
lies it on the top step for me to sit upon
like a flourished cape across
a muddy rivelet.

I am a princess and he is a gentleman with
sweet tea and  a
handkerchief, a voice like
Dr. King, a smile like
Satchmo, and
stories I will listen to
with the hunger of
a granddaughter
aching for her
history.

Stories that will make me laugh
with the telling of,
break with the knowledge of,
and weep over, long after
his grandson arrives home,
and I have continued
walking down a sycamore-shaded
city street on
a crisp October day.

His stories will fuel my resolve,
and inspire my prayers...

...not for the election of "a man"
but for the emancipation of
all men, women and children...
emancipation 
from the slavery of
"time-honored systems" and
the kind of hatred that is borne of
ignorance...
ignorance,
and
years of never
being willing to sit with
one another,
linger on a porch step,
accept a jelly-glass of
iced sweet tea,
and hear
each other's
stories...
and
weep...

still, with hope...audacious hope,

Kate
Kate Robertson, CS

"A haven from my unbelief..."

"In this world I walk alone
with no place to call my own.
But there's one who holds my hand
the rugged road, through barren lands...

The way is dark,
the road is steep,
but He's become my eyes to see.
The strength to climb
my griefs to bear
The Saviour lives inside me there...

In your love I find release
A haven from my unbelief
Take my life and let it be
a living prayer, my God to Thee..."

"A haven from my unbelief..."  I remember the first time I heard this little snippet of lyric from Allison Krauss' "A Living Prayer."  There was, in her voice, such sweet compassion.  A gentle "I've been there" spoke to the place in my heart that sometimes felt tight and tense with blind faith -- the kind of faith that hadn't yet blossomed into understanding.

And it was in the safe harbor of this haven that I finally allowed myself to dive into the deep waters of, "Lord I believe, help thou mine unbelief." It was here that I would explore the buoying properties of a new truth.  Here I could open up and surrender to a wider, broader view of God and the meaning of His presence in my life -- and in the world.

I can still feel the cool breeze of that late October day.  The way it billowed the gauzy white linen curtains.  The softness of its touch as it came through the French doors in my office -- open wide to the last golden light of that Indian summer day. 

I was sitting at my desk, books and dictionaries spread in front of me.  Head in my hands, I was praying for "understanding." When it washed over me, I had been seeking "understanding" as a noun -- something I thought I could get, find, have, own.  But in an instant I sensed something new -- something that I had never really grasped in the context of my spiritual hunger. Understanding was a verb -- a way of being in the world.  It was something I could be -- rather than have.

Mary Baker Eddy's statement from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:

"...understanding is not intellectual,
is not the result of scholarly attainments;
it is the reality of all things brought to light."

came alive for me.

I had been studying, exploring, searching for understanding.  But what I suddenly saw was that if I wanted to be a person of understanding, I had to be an understanding person.  I had to be thoughtful, compassionate, non-judgmental -- willing to look at a situation through a kinder lens, with better eyes. I needed to exercise vision -- look at everything through the eyes of understanding, the eyes of love.  This divine viewpoint would bring "to light" God's presence in every moment, with every person, through all things.

Understanding became a behavior that transcended my unbelief.  It no longer matter what I believed -- or for that matter, what anyone believed.  What mattered was what the light of Love revealed about everyone, in every situation. What mattered was whether I was thinking in accordance with Love's understanding of things -- moment-by-moment. 

It didn't matter whether someone else felt impelled to share gossip. Or if I was hearing news reports about a terrorist attack on refugees along the Gaza. My response had to be "understanding."  To not judge [self]righteous judgment, but to judge every man according to his/her indissoluable relationship with God. 

I had the right to affirm that no one could disassociate him/herself from God's presence and power. This understanding of that one true fact, gave me the courage to trust God's Word "to enrich the affections of all mankind and govern them." (from Mary Baker Eddy's "The Daily Prayer").  It freed me to think, speak, and act with kindness, compassion, gentleness, and grace -- no matter what is going on around me.  No matter what I may not understand. Whether or not it fit within the paradigm of my own beliefs.

Understanding is my haven from unbelief.  Understanding -- compassion, kindness, non-judgment -- is a way of being in the world that lifts us into the space of living love. Within this sanctuary of understanding, we become a practical, effective, breathing, walking, living prayer -- a prayer that heals.

with Love,

Kate


[photo of Lindsey Arthur Tamm by Sune Tamm-Buckle 2010]

"You were only waiting for this moment to arise..."

"Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings
and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting
for this moment to arise..."
Lennon/McCartney

We'd been friends and colleagues. We loved music and coffeehouses, Joni Mitchell and anyone singing "Blackbird."  It was our song. 

I'd sat knee-to-knee with her in faculty senate meetings. I'd listened to her ideas on countless conference calls, and we'd enjoyed talking mission and vision in the company of colleagues with opposing points of view. I'd helped her with curriculum planning.  She'd helped me with tenure, promotions, and appointments decisions.  The goal was a better institution, not to be better than one another.  Ten-year plans and organizational strategies were our favorite board games.  I trusted her.  I respected her.  And in the blink of a moment, our relationship was gone. 

As our career paths had crossed, converged, and diverged over the years, we'd each had opportunities and disappointments, successes and setbacks.  We were each other's shoulder to cry on, and biggest fan.  That was, until one of us broke through a glass ceiling of sorts, and became the other's "boss."

I'd never felt more misunderstood and alone.  Navigating this new territory was terrifying.  No matter what I said it was taken as a slight.  No matter what she said, it felt like an attack.  Our mutual friends were traumatized, our families were confused, and our hearts were breaking.

The funny thing was, I now know that we were both praying…humbly, meekly, importunately. And we were both hearing our “angels” (God’s thoughts passing to man, spiritual intuitions – pure and perfect) but, in our own, personal angel-inhabited versions of heaven, we were, each, the only one who could possibly be right…leaving us both alone. She stole my voice, I undermined her vision, which of us had more authority, “who’s on first” …and on, and on it went, until we found ourselves avoiding department meetings if we thought we’d run into eachother.

Then one night I was sitting in my office, long after the cleaning crew had come through, and I heard sobbing from the other end of the hall.  I wondered if it might have been a graduate assistant with boyfriend troubles, and decided to offer my sage twenty-something counsel. 

I got up from my desk, headed towards the "bullpen" at the far end of the hall where staff assistants and student interns, had their desks. 

But the sound of crying became fainter with each footstep.  So I turned and headed back toward "our" end of the hall, where private offices lined the corridor.  As I passed my own office and continued further away from the bullpen, the weeping got louder until I was standing in front of my friend's office.  It was obvious.  She was in deep emotional pain.  These were not frustrated, angry tears, this was the sound of a broken heart.

I didn't have to know if I was at the core of her heartbreak, just the thought that I might be, was more than enough.  Tears flooded my eyes and washed the darkly imagined personal sense script of hurt, and ego-centric "me-vs.-thee" thinking from my heart.  The compassion I immediately felt for my friend...in that moment...was like light radiating from within.  A laser-like Love that cut through mis-understanding with the only kind of "understanding" that ever really matters...an understanding heart. 

It didn't matter who was "boss."  It didn't matter which of us had a better working understanding of the lives of early women thought-pioneers, or a more scholarly understanding of the importance of suffrage, or who understood the history of feminism or spiritual texts that honored the divine feminine.  The only understanding that really mattered was our sisterhood, our compassion for one another.  The only thing that would make a difference was an understanding of where someone else might be coming from, what they might be going through, and how they might be feeling. The understanding that mattered was the kind that was synonymous with compassion, not intellectual achievement or scholarship.

In that moment of compassion, divine Love pierced the membrane of self, and deflated the ego. 

I tiptoed away from my colleague's door and back towards my own office where I picked up the phone and called her at her desk.  I somehow knew that if my own ego-hardened heart could be spiritually re-booted, perhaps so could hers.  I can now see that we'd both been hoodwinked by "the ego," and we were discovering that it was time to kick it out of our relationship...together.

When she answer softly...probably having seen my office extension displayed on her phone console, I told her I'd noticed the light under her office door and wondered if she wanted a cup of tea and some of the girl scout cookies I'd brought in that morning.  I knew I was on sacred ground, we shared a great love for Thin Mints...and eachother.

Within ten minutes, we'd started over...tea, chocolate cookies...and understanding.  We were not two isolated blackbirds singing in the dead of night...alone and broken.   We were women, sisters, friends...waiting for "this moment to arrive" like an updraft, a thermal of Love, lifting us above competition, hierarchy, comparison, and the insidious invitation to jockey for position. We were beyond glass ceilings...we were soaring in the space of Love's genderless sky where all sing...where all sweep, and glide, and speak, and dance in Pneuma's ever-equalized, rarified spiritual enviroment. No drop in pressure, no ozone layers of pride and selfishness, no toxic envy or arrogance....just Love.

We would go on to celebrate eachother's victories, encourage one another to dream very special dreams...even after we ceased to have offices on the same hall...make big differences, in an even bigger world, and pledge to never stand on the shoulders of another woman, but link arms with our fellow sisters and rise together on that updraft of spiritual compassion and love...to bring other women higher with us as we learned to fly.

I am so grateful for the sisterhood of sweet-throated blackbirds...sharing a thermal is the best way to travel!!

with Love,
Kate
Kate Robertson, CS