MUHU AFTERGLOW
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I created this page so that the magic of our time on Muhu can stay with us - nourishing us, connecting us, offering us hope, and opening a portal into Kairos time.
Below, you’ll find poetry, quotes, and musings from the retreat, woven together with images to spark the felt sense of being there and perhaps invite some of that magic back into the present moment.

One of the threads running through our days together in Muhu was the ancient distinction between Chronos and Kairos time. Chronos being measurable, sequential and quantitative time: the time of clocks, calendars, schedules, deadline, practice and repetition. Kairos stands for lived time: the timeless moment, the opening, the moment when we are fully present with what is happening and something essential has the possibility of emerge. Michael Meade (a writer and teacher I quoted often during the retreat) describes Kairos as the time of myth, dreams, soul, creativity, synchronicity and transformation. Just as I got back from our retreat, I saw a clip where writer and researcher Brené Brown called Kairos "the deep time, God time, vulnerable vital openness. An openness and vulnerability to stay receptive for something that can only happen on spiritual time". 

Michael Meade speaks of our culture as being caught in Chronos time, where everything is measured, counted, optimized and accelerated, and reminds us that what we may be lacking is not more time, but more experiences of timelessness. I loved the possibility of thinking about our retreat itself in this way: Chronos time created the conditions, for the Kairos time to break through. We showed up, we followed a schedule, we practised and then there were those moments that could not be planned or manufactured: a deep exhale, a moment of unexpected stillness, a flash of understanding or a sense of connection and belonging. That is Kairos time. 

I’m listening

I’m listening
But I don’t know 
if what I hear is silence
or God. 

I’m listening
but I can’t tell
if I hear the plane of emptiness echoing
or a keen consciousness
that at the ends of the universe
deciphers and watches me. 

I only know that I walk like someone
who is beheld
beloved
and known. 

And because of this
I put into my every movement
solemnity and risk. 

      ~ Sophia de-Mello Breyner

I love the invitation of this poem to stay open and attentive. That faith is less about certainty and more about orientation. To be able to listen without certainty, but to walk with dignity because of the possibility of being "beheld, beloved and known". What matters is the kind of person one becomes in response to mystery. (Liina)

Slow' and 'down' are modes of the soul; they are connective modes, ways of keeping connected to oneself and to one’s environment. 'Slowing downwards' refers to more than simply moving slowly, it means growing down towards the roots of one’s being. Instead of outward growth and upward climb, life at times must turn inward and downward in order to grow in other ways. There is a shift to the vertical down that re-turns us to root memories, root metaphors, and timeless things that shape our lives from within. Slowing downwards creates opportunities to dwell more deeply in one’s life, for the home we are looking for in this world is within us all along. The lost home that we are seeking is ourselves; it is the story we carry within our soul." - Michael Meade 

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​Love, Like Water

We could say the pain
was a block so great
        it could not be moved.
We could say love
did not try to move it.
        Love simply dissolved the mass
and surrounded it
the way water meets a block of salt,
        breaking apart each ionic bond
until every atom of sodium and chloride
is surrounded by molecules of water.
        And in this way,
and sooner than you’d think,
the pain was rearranged
        into minuscule bits,
and there was no part of the pain
that was not touched by love.
        The pain was no less, it’s true.
But mixed with love, dispersed,
the pain became something new.
        Something vital that encouraged
a different kind of life,
a substance that supported buoyancy--
        a medium to carry me.

     ~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

The poem Love, Like Water, made me think of a description offered by Mackenzie Amara (Embodied Depth Psychology). I'm paraphrasing - she talks about an idea from Carl Jung the "there are certain problems in our lives that we cannot fix or heal. We can simply grow larger than them." She bring an image of mixing colour into water. The water takes on the added colour, but as you pour in more water, the mixture becomes more translucent. And of course, as you add more water, the container has to expand in order to hold it. 

She mentions that our problems can have a similar effect. "As our container expands - as we grow larger - the problem, the pigment, the pain point, becomes diluted. It spreads through a much larger volume and therefore feels less demanding, less dramatic, and less painful.
This is actually a very simple idea to put into practice because we're surrounded by a life that's bigger than our personal life. We're surrounded by nature, by other living creatures, and by the infinite depths of other people.
So the next time you're feeling really stuck, see what you can pay attention to that's bigger than you - bigger than your story. It might help dilute the intensity a little bit.”

​In this piece of writing the pain is diluted because the container grows. And in the poem, the pain is transformed because love permeates it. I'd love to offer these contemplative metaphors of expansion and permeability of love as a potential viewpoint where healing is not always about subtracting or fixing or even transcending (Liina)

SPIDER 

All of my pain is a spider
I’ve learned not to crush
with the heel of my shoe
but to guide with a page
of my journal
into an empty glass
asking questions about its life,
its purpose, as I walk
careful out to the garden
and rest it down on the earth.

​My pain, how happy it is
to leave me whenever
I treat it kind.

~ Andrea Gibson

Go Slow 

Go at the pace of the mosses and the trees; slow enough that green tendrils begin to sprout from your fingernails and lichen swathes your eyebrows.
Go so slowly that your roots spread and uncoil and writhe down through soil and rock. Be the slow medicine that this too-fast world needs.
Give yourself time to unfurl like a fern in the forest, ready to catch the sweet rain, the starlight, and the passing butterflies.
Go gently. Remember, you have pushed through many long, hard days to get here. No wonder you are tired.

​Take fallow days. They will be among your most productive times.
​Wander the wild, overgrown pathways which lead to the places in you
where thousands of bright, tiny flowers open each morning to the sun
in meadows as vast as the sky.
 
And when the time comes to show the world your beautiful colours,
let the gentle season of your life work their own slow magic,
and bloom.

    ~ Caroline Mellor

Imagine  
​
You are not
this rented little tree
​shiver-dancing near the top
of an overlooked mountain,
fated to the thin, rocky
soil of your life. 

But imagine if you were - 
Imagine if

all you had to do
to be beautiful
was to let the wind
dance you where you stand
as you grow into 
the only shape
you ever had. 

   ~ James Pearson

Faithfully following the flow

In these moments I let myself thaw
from noun to verb, finding my own
fluidity, and let gravity begin
​to pull like an old, sweet summoning

I then sluice through the labyrinthian cracks
in my own becoming, flowing faithfully
right to the feet of this great mountain 
of stillness behind my sternum.
And then - here I am
ancient, drunk
on the richness of gaining 
absolutely nothing at all. 

    ~ Brooke McNamara

What I'm Trying to Say

I’m not saying it’s been easy,
this life. Harder, in fact,
than you ever expected.

What I’m saying is that
every one of your mornings
has been met by the sun rising.

Every time you made a dollar
it was met by an apple,
whose firm white flesh--
a partnership of tree and rain,
of sunlight and farmer and soil
​—is no different than a miracle.

What I’m trying to say is
the world has worked wonders
to put ground beneath
every one of your steps.

You were never alone.
Even now you can lean back
into the strong arms of this moment
and let yourself be held
by what’s always held you.

Every day there’s a reason
to bathe your life in gratitude.

 ~ James Pearson


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“When I began to listen to poetry, it’s when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to others. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else.”  ~ Joy Harjo

RIPE 

I will make wine
from this time
and drink it
iIn my old age
on a rocking chair
on some porch
under a warm sun. 

It will taste of 
sunflowers
and books,
with earthly notes
of belly laughter
and mud
and heartache.
​
I’m already
drunk
on the memories. 

    ~ Emory Hall

ADRIFT

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
​This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat. The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.

   ~Mark Nepo

FOR WHEN PEOPLE ASK

I want a word that means
​okay and not okay,
more than that: a word that means
devastated and stunned with joy.
I want the word that says
I feel it all all at once.

The heart is not like a songbird
singing only one note at a time,
more like a Tuvan throat singer
able to sing both a drone
and simultaneously
two or three harmonics high above it--
a sound, the Tuvans say,
that gives the impression
of wind swirling among rocks.

The heart understands swirl,
how the churning of opposite feelings
weaves through us like an insistent breeze
leads us wordlessly deeper into ourselves,
blesses us with paradox
so we might walk more openly

into this world so rife with devastation,
this world so ripe with joy.

   ~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

With love, 
Liina

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NEXT YEAR'S RETREAT DATES ARE SET:
​August 5 - 10, 2027 

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