05.18.2026. Mud, Ants, Pink-Ruffle Blooms
Hello dear Friends,
🌸 Please note: There is no in-person meditation for the next two weeks — Monday, May 18 and Monday, May 25 (Memorial Day). There are 4 spots open for Healing Vessel, an evening of deep, still rest and healing, on June 2. If your heart is a yes,click here.
🍃
“Did you know that the ant has a tongue
with which to gather in all that it can
of sweetness?”— Mary Oliver, "Flare"
This gathering of sweetness, this Metta Letter with its tender offerings below, this common ant with its tongue working hard — swarming and licking the nectar secreted by peony buds, readying them into bloom. This licking we each do to encourage, inspire, and unfold our soft, thousand-petal, pink-ruffle bloom. Some say that if the ants don't clean off this sugary sap — this stickiness off the peony bud — it will remain stuck closed. I wonder if this is true?
Even if it is not true, what an exquisite ponder — this idea of the small and mighty, a swarm of six-to-thirteen-millimeter plump ants defending and opening blooms! This power of small, the exquisite (not so easy) beauty of consistent effort and tender care. All the small but mighty ways we each encourage, lick open each other's bloom. How gorgeous is this!
Then there are the inward tendings we do too.
Every time we sit down on the cushion. Every time we slow our insides way down — like a glass of muddy water slowly settling — this is the sweet nectar needed for our hearts and nervous systems too.
My meditation teacher would say: when you find yourself tight-fisted, your heart in a tight, held-closed bud, the first step is to stop breathing — hold the breath. This interrupts the crazymaking mind, the relentless litany of murky thoughts, old stories and habituated patterns, swirling about, running our insides amok, cementing the mind's negative bias in solid, concrete-true.
This stopping of breath inserts a pause. Even if for only one gorgeous moment — a space opens up that is mighty! A million smalls, a million pauses, add up to mighty too. And it is said: anchoring our breath in our body is the quickest path to this present moment, only moment — the present moment is the only moment available to us, as Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh would say.
"When things get difficult, pay benevolent attention to your body."
— Jack Kornfield
Praise for this paying attention, for this slowing it way, way down, for this turning towards the body, towards the inside swirling of muddy water —we go there ‘with gentle’, hand-on-heart, feel and notice. We name each sensation, each speck of muddy silt spinning wildly about— and we just name, tag each one with a fluorescent sticky note: tight shoulders, clenching breath, heat in the chest, rigid jaw, ruminating worry, burning fear and anxiety, crocodile tears of stuck grief and sadness.
We recognize, we name. Somehow this allowing, this staying ‘with’— the mud-dirt begins to settle, drifts to the floor, like letting go of a silk scarf we feel it cascade into a soft mound. A kindness arises. I wish I could share how, this quality of friendliness that interrupts the judging fearful mind. The only word that comes here is grace. Somehow safe and space opens. Choice opens. We can begin to see, taste, smell, and touch more clearly who and what is here, as my teacher would say — who is here, and who knows who is here? We glimpse the enormity, the elegance of this 'I am' that uplifts and resides on our insides.
Our hearts begin to ease, the first gesture of the open heart, and calm, not a perfect, happy-happy, all-is-good calm— but a calm that has a capacity to meet and hold the betweens: everything between the beauty ⇢ and ⇠sorrow, the clear water and the toe-squishing mud, with compassion and 'the what is' of being human.
Maybe with aging, maybe with gray, maybe with tired, with kind, with prayer, I'm falling in love with dark muddy water. No more run, too tired for road trips on my insides now. We sit down, mud and I, old friends, too tired to battle, to scar. I listen — soft and tender — as the dirt slowly settles alongside each of my gasping sobs, licking clean the wounds of heart hurts, the way sacred friends do, tending to the sticky stuff that blocks our heart bloom.
Settle in the here and now.
Reach down into the center
where the world is not spinning
and drink this holy peace.
– Danna Faulds
🍃
In a gentle way, you can shake the world.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Closing in warmth and care, and so thankful we are in this together,
Love, Wini
PS: May the poems, quotes, and the links below offer sparks of inspiration and beauty for your soul.
♥️ and this closing song, by an Irish female composer, played for the first time 90 years after it was composed... lovely!
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🌸 Two Poems. “The sensation of writing is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of rearing and peering from a bent tip of a grassblade, looking for a route.” – Annie Dillard
Between Breaths | James Crews
Rest in peace, we say when someone has passed,
even going so far as to carve the words into stone.
But why not find that kind of peace while still
alive-not in the rest of death, but in the pause
between breaths that tells us we are more animal
than human, more heart than mind. Like the moment
before a slick green grasshopper leaps from
wet grass onto my foot. Like the moment I watch you
lifting slices of bread from the toaster, slowly
buttering the cratered surface of each one with care.
Like the moment I see two young women dancing
in the lobby of a grocery store where they are
redeeming their bottles and cans, moving
to a private music only they can hear.
Crossroads | Louise Glück
My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young—
love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities.
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised—
My soul has been so fearful, so violent:
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,
not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:
it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.
🍃 This new tenderness. This love. This forgiveness. This stopping of brutality — in all its subtle and large unkindnesses towards our bodies, our hearts, ourselves.
This pile-up of griefs we hold with reverence: for all the overriding, pushing through, all the forms of hard ignoring of this body we all do. Then something startles us awake — an illness, an ache, a body aging, a mind dimming, an awareness of finite time — and we halt. We see clearly: it was never about good, bad, ugly, right, or wrong, this body. It was always about grace — remarkable, about bare feet and mud-squishing toes, touching bodies and earth.
And then we really listen, knowing we have been given a pardon. We drop to our knees in redemption and resurrection, weeping tenderness out of every pore of our skin, our hanging flesh, the brokenness visible in the lines of our faces, and we say ‘yes, yes’, I will cherish you, this body, like a bride to a groom.
🌸 Three Quotes | Rev. Cameron Trimble. Joan Chittister,. Martin Luther King.
“The bedrock of spiritual maturity is learning to belong to the Mother again. We need to stop seeing creation mainly as a resource, property, or background. We should remember that we are creatures too, dependent, vulnerable, and connected to everything else that lives and breathes. Our bodies are literally made of the minerals of Mother Earth….Under all the noise of modern life, the Earth is still trying to teach us the same old wisdom:
You were never separate from the living world.
You belong to it.”
― Rev. Cameron Trimble, You Belong to the Living World, Piloting Faith: An (Almost) Daily Meditation Substack
“This culture does not teach beauty in its schools nor require it in its programs. Most of all, it does not prescribe it for its healing value. The value of beauty in shaping the soul, let alone in curing the ills that a lack of beauty brings on, we ignore…
…When we begin to recognize beauty, to see it all around us, it has done its work on us. Steeped in beauty, we have become beautiful ourselves. We are calm now, uplifted, enriched by the world around us, deepened in our sensitivities, our vision of the world more finely honed. We become the beauty we have come to see everywhere.”
— Joan Chittister,Two Dogs and a Parrot: What Our Animal Friends Can Teach Us About the Meaning of Life
"Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter. As you press for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the power and the weapons of love."
―Martin Luther King
🍃 This temptation to become bitter, or brittle, this is something I know well. I feel its creep, its tip-toes across my wood floors to buffer the sound of its arrival.
My meditation teacher would say, again and again, "We become bitter old men and women when we dedicate our life to sleep. When we are not doing our work of waking up."
We know this to be true — this weariness of age, just from living a long life, the "bitter honeys given," as in Jane Hirshfield's poem "Rebus."
My teacher would offer this teaching reminder, this spark of inspiration:
When the body, mind, and heart get worn down, we can no longer hold the mask-self in place (the self, the shiny penny we present to society). If we are not on a devoted path and practice of awakening the heart, of awakening into presence, we easily become more vulnerable to the slip, the dark alley of "bitter,” this derails our tender hearts.
🌸 Loving Up Your Heart | Four Offerings: 🐑 🌱 🪵 🧘♀️
Is your heart in need of an uplifting film?The Sheep Detectives is your movie.
Yes, the trailer may have you thinking, "Maybe not" — yet this film has entered my office three times, recommended by three unrelated sources. It's a murder mystery with a 94% Tomatometer rating. Reviews overflow with praise:
“Fantastic! Takes you by surprise!”
“Made me laugh and made me cry twice.”
“It’s also the rare kind of movie after which you can exit the theater saying, ‘They don’t make movies like that anymore!”
“Well, I repent. Not only is “The Sheep Detectives” delightful, but it’s funny and emotionally complex.”
“Dew evaporates. So does this life. And somehow, that makes it more precious, not less,”Jack Kornfield.
A brief listen here. And a longer version here (8:27 min), where Jack shares two experiences — one an out-of-body experience — that changed the way he understands what we are, and the unbearable beauty of this life.
Dew evaporates
And all our world is dew—
So dear, so fresh, so fleeting.
— Kobayashi Issa
“Pema Chödrön, welcome to the show. It is such a pleasure to have you here.“ Ezra Klein. The Ezra Klein Show, “This Is Why I Find Pema Chödrön So Essential” The New York Times, May 15, 2026.
This I want to send out to everyone I love! 💌 So rich!
How lucky we are. We have this opportunity to sit with beloved Pema Chödrön, now eighty-nine years old, here with Ezra Klein. It is as if we are sitting on retreat with her, receiving a dharma teaching. Profound wisdom and transmission, worthy of every minute.
Listen to the episode here or on Youtube here(1:15:51 min)
Another offering, sent my way by unrelated sources — this New York Times article and this Instagram clip. So many lovely gems to be mined, seeds for your heart:
Allowing. Leaning into the sharp points. Making friends with old habitual responses. The only way out is through. The body. Unconditional warmth — this seems to be the way. What are you feeling? Find that feeling in your body. Get away from concepts and words; put a hand there. Let's be okay with it hurting sometimes. The wonderful thing about boredom. Becoming more alive.
“I just pray I get to finish it,” woodcut artist Jimmy Grashow says. Jimmy & The Demons 2026｜A Life Carved in Wood
This inspires me — keeping my own heart alive to flourish, no matter our age, no matter the "whatevers" of the not-so-kind internal voices that want to stop us, to halt our beauty offering itself out into the world.
Watch this short trailer: his effort, his heart, his wife supporting his bloom, his bloom, his words — "I just pray I get to finish it."
Who doesn’t know this prayer: May I complete my holy task this lifetime.
His showing up touches my own well of devotion, and brings the scent of my meditation teacher's words from long ago close in. They pierced my heart then, and now — and may they be an offering spark for your heart too: "As long as there is breath in my body, I will be doing the work of waking up."
Holy amen. As long as there is breath in our bodies, we have this great opportunity to contribute, to stitch more threads of beauty, holy and complex, into this earth.
🌸 Closing Song | Ina Boyle, Remarkable Composer
Ina Boyle (1889–1967) — extraordinary and long-overlooked Irish composer, described as the most prolific and significant Irish woman composer of the first half of the 20th century. She spent her entire life writing deeply introspective, lyrical, and serious music while living in relative isolation in her family home, Bushey Park, in Enniskerry, a village at the foot of the Wicklow Mountains.
I heard her music and felt this uprising of soul — holy amen, who is this woman?
Listen to "Psalm" by Ina Boyle, played for the first time 90 years after it was composed. Deeply inspiring. Click here.
🌸🙏Dedicate Merit
In all mystical traditions, there is a closing prayer — prayers of blessing, gratitude, and protection.
May you open wider than dreamed possible.
May you listen to the whisper of your body.
May you know you are beauty Light.
May all beings be safe and protected
— this I wish for you.
May we awaken fully to help all beings.
— Love, Wini
Have a blessed day 💖
🌸 PS. You can find all the newsletters archived on my website.
These newsletters will always be free—and if you appreciate receiving these weekly sparks of tender-goodness please consider offering your support through Buy Me a Coffee, 🌸 venmo (Winifred-Nimrod) 🌸 or zelle (wininim@gmail.com) 🌸
Thank you, I am a one-woman, two-finger typing, unfolding her thousand-petal bloom.
✨ May we bloom more Light.
💞 May we grow more Goodness for the healing of all.
🌎 May each of us thread our heart-tenderness, our Beauty, into the fabric of our planet.
….Until next week. 💖 ✨
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Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
- Mary Oliver
Website:https://www.wininimrod.com/
