Blessingway

Yup, it's been a long time!  Between spending the summer working, getting the house ready for baby, making baby things, sleeping a lot, and now with the start of teaching again, I haven't made much time to post, though I have thought about it often!  Today my sister Shaina and one of my very best friends Taylor hosted a blessingway ceremony for me.  It was beautiful to be surrounded by so many old and new dear friends.  I felt showered with love.  Rites of passage are very important to me and I hope that our family will be able to have some special traditions to celebrate different rites of passage for our child(ren).
Here is the poem that Shaina read for the ceremony:

Love Life

You are here to love life,
that is what the Universe is
offering; the opportunity to step
fully, ever more deeply, every day,
in every breath into the possibility
of savoring the gift of embodiment,
of realizing the Universe has gone
through great lengths, all this trouble
to make you, that you're not here
to get something, or acquire something
or achieve something, but merely
to taste, to savor the gift of
the conversation of the heart.
And let that be enough to
let this message of love in.

                          -Gopala Iver Sundarmoorthy

Here is the poem that I read towards the end of the ceremony:

Ordinary Miracle

I have mourned lost days
When I accomplished nothing of importance.
But not lately.
Lately under the lunar tide
of a woman's ocean, I work
My own sea-change:
Turning grains of sand to human eyes.
I daydream after breakfast
While the spirit of egg and toast
knits together a length of bone
as fine as a wheatstalk.
Later, as I postpone weeding the garden
I will make two hands
that may tend a hundred gardens.

I need ten full moons exactly
for keeping the animal promise.
I offer myself up: unsaintly, but
transmuted anyway
by the most ordinary miracle.
I am nothing in this world beyond the things one woman does.
But here are eyes that once were pearls,
and here is a second chance where there was none.

                               -Barbara Kingsolver

And I will let that be enough for now.  I feel blessed!