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Dear Radical Readers,
By now you’ve probably noticed how 2013 has shaped up to
become a very theme-oriented year on The Radical Virgo. In April, we had Poetry
Month. May brought us the Planetary Fishing Trips where we went on a
metaphorical outing to reel in each of our planets in hopes of catching a more
personalized relationship with them. In July we did dreamwork. August found us
dabbling in oracles.
In September, we celebrated Old Home Month, a homecoming of
sorts to the sign this blog was named after and a deeper look at Virgo. During
October we hosted my favorite articles from my spirited living blog, Hot Flashbacks, Cool
Insights.
But wait—there’s more!
In the USA, we celebrate Thanksgiving in November--the
perfect time to pray and count our blessings. Recently my husband had the
second of two scary hospitalizations in five months. In an effort to turn the
cusp of worry into something more productive and faith-full, I visited the
chapel at UC-Davis Hospital in Sacramento. There I found brochures with prayers
from every kind of spiritual path: Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Native American
and Islam, to name a few. It reminded me how important prayer has always been
in my life and what a comfort it is in times of stress. While we tend to pray
when someone needs healing or when thing go wrong, the best prayer of all is Thank God he’s going to be all right!
Counting our blessings is a positive prayer, thanking God/Goddess/All That Is
for what’s right in our world.
In the chapel that day, all alone except for the sound of a
beautiful wall fountain running over a metal sculpture to rocks below in the
basin, I was grateful for the faith of my childhood. It was both a rock for
building a solid spiritual life and a place where there was always a lot of
water in the form of holy water and baptismal fonts. As I grew spiritually to
encompass the best of many paths, I became more involved in doing eclectic
ritual, borrowing from them all, resonating to the core of strength and
well-being evoked by prayer and spiritual poems.
You’ll see some of my favorites and new discoveries in
November—and we’ll explore why prayer and gratitude are such potent practices
for keeping our connection from Earth to Sky wired for miraculous results.
Every sunrise is a gift of the recurring cycle of life. It deserves my
favorite, most simple prayer of all: Thank
God. [1] More specifically, thank God
for another day of loving.
May every day be Thanksgiving,
Joyce
NOTE:
[1] Throughout this series, I’m going to invite you to substitute
whatever is comfortable for you when it comes to describing Higher Power: God,
Goddess, All That Is, Spirit, the Universe—or fill in the blank. Just today a friend told me, “I still have
trouble with the G-word.” She was raised in a fundamentalist religion, and
having experienced the results of religious rigidity myself, I know how
important it is can be to find a new vision of deity or the Divine All
Together, as I sometimes call Him/Her/It/Them. What I hope we won’t do is throw
out the baby with the holy water when it comes to a great prayer that just may
need a minor edit of terms for you to find its healing gold.
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