10.27.2025. Block that Caller
Hello dear Friends,
“Block that caller,” she said.
🍃
Perhaps you know this one. That caller who has memorized all your old addresses and phone numbers by heart, who does not have the common decency to adhere to any house rules—no phone calls or visitors past 10 PM; nothing good happens past midnight. This one loves to ambush you at the strangest of times—mostly its favorite hours between two and four AM. Relishes when you are vulnerable, tossing half-asleep in the deep dark. Shows up loud and persistent, when it knows no one is around to be a help—to help you hush its voice, stand your ground, slam the door on that harsh judgy friend. It arrives on a terrible madness, yells and whispers a stack of lies, and clips your wings with silent words: “You suck, are not enough, your life is mush.” It knows your ‘spot’—where to strike, leave heavy black bootprints on your heart.
“Block that caller,” my friend said. “It wants to destroy what is rare and holy in your bones. Take that caller off your list. We are really getting too old for this!”
Then she said, “Every time we give in to its insidious ways, we give it more oxygen, and it grows. Every time we don't, we dilute it.”
This is why we need our communion of friends, the people who know this place, know the wounds inflicted by our own inner self-critic. Then we can get ourselves out of its way—know we are in this together. This is not personal. We all have baggage, clutter with brittle lids, voices that tell us awful, hard, terrible, dried-up things.
We let gentle and self-compassion seep into our bones like tea steeping in hot water, a cup we hold in our two hands, and breathe. Warm steam and upward-wandering, moist, soft curls become holy ground, adding form to our prayers, soothing our shaking fears.
With gentle nudges from our inner devoted monk and our outer sacred friends, we go forward, go toward what we love. We jump in that water and swim, swim, swim.
Come Join Me Today *
Drop-in Meditation Monday
All are welcome; no prior experience is needed—just bring an open heart.
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM: 20-minute Guided Meditation Working With Painful Emotions & 25-minute Metta Meditation Practice
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM: Conversations on the Practice of Meditation
* New Temporary Location: 778 West Frontage Road, Suite 114, Northfield, IL
Donations are gratefully accepted.
Closing with heart beats of gratitude,
Love, Wini
Scroll below: More goodness to find, made with ♥️.
💌 If this newsletter has meant something to you, I invite you to pass it along—send it to a friend, a colleague, or someone in your life who might need a reminder about the power of tenderness and care. Subscribe for your own copy
🌸 ✍️ 📃 Two Poems
Out of the Mouths of a Thousand Birds | Hafiz
Listen -
Listen more carefully to what is around you
Right now.
In my world
There are the bells from the clanks
Of the morning milk drums,
And a wagon wheel outside my window
Just hit a bump
Which turned into an ecstatic chorus
Of the Beloved's Name.
There is the Prayer Call
Rising up like the sun
Out of the mouths of a thousand birds.
There is an astonishing vastness
Of movement and Life
Emanating sound and light
From my folded hands
And my even quieter simple being and heart.
My dear,
Is it true that your mind
Is sometimes like a battering
Ram
Running all through the city,
Shouting so madly inside and out
About the ten thousand things
That do not matter?
Hafiz, too,
For many years beat his head in youth
And thought himself at a great distance,
Far from an armistice
With God.
But that is why this scarred old pilgrim
Has now become such a sweet rare vintage
Who weeps and sings for you.
O listen -
Listen more carefully
To what is inside of you right now.
In my world
All that remains is the wondrous call to
Dance and prayer
Rising up like a thousand suns
Out of the mouth of a
Single bird.
Dawn Revisited | Rita Dove
Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don't look back,
the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits -
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours
to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You'll never know
who's down there, frying those eggs,
if you don't get up and see.
🍃 This poem, these words: “Come on, shake a leg!”
I laughed out loud when I read Rita Dove's poem, inviting me into joy, into life, into kitchen smells of frying eggs, into "come on"—stop moping about!
I let the word "prodigal" play me, too. Sometimes I look up a word to look at its root—the Latin prōdigus, "lavish." Then the lavish smells of my childhood emerged, too: the Bible's Parable of the Prodigal Son. Oh, I never liked that story much—the reckless child who squanders everything celebrated in his return. As a kid, I was so invested in black and white, good. Yet, isn't that the true beauty, the goodness of this life: redemption, return, making mistakes?
Every day, the sun rises, bows its long pink-yellow rays across this forgiving earth to us, sings to us, waits for us.
Every day, no matter our past, no matter how lost or found we are, no matter if we squandered our fortunes—this one precious life—away.
Every day, a second chance, a new dawn. We get to choose a different narrative; it is not the end of our stories yet—it is not too late to have greatness of heart!
“Oh, hello, blank page, blank day!”
🌸 ❝ Three Quotes ❞ | Joy Harjo. Ram Dass. Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee.
“It's possible to understand the world from studying a leaf. You can comprehend the laws of aerodynamics, mathematics, poetry and biology through the complex beauty of such a perfect structure. It's also possible to travel the whole globe and learn nothing.” ― Joy Harjo, The Woman Who Fell from The Sky
“If our spiritual work has come out of wisdom, not out of a need for power but out of a yearning for God, then when the powers come, we just notice them, realizing they are going to take us on tangents, consume them, and keep going.” – Ram Dass
🍃 Another share: The Ram Dass Love Serve Remember Foundation
Today, 📅 Monday, October 27 🕓 7pm CST / 8pm ET an intimate conversation with Mirabai Starr and Anne Lamott.📍 Register & Join us on Zoom (Free). A conversation about spirituality, authenticity, and finding the sacred in our everyday lives.
“We have this idea that offering is a doing, is an action, is a set of words, is a ritual, is a ceremony, is a song, is a prayer. And it is all of those things and so much more. But where did those forms of offering come from? They came from a space of reverence and an attention toward being in response to a place and a time and a people, a landscape, and a season.” –Sufi teacher Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
🍃From a three-part series from our Song of the Seasons retreat– A Offering Our Attention with Humility: A Talk by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee (42 min)
🌸 📺 📚 Give A Watch. A Read | Two Post Meditation Conversation Offerings
YouTube: Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's name came into the room, into the post-meditation conversation. Her TedTalk, My Stroke of Insight, posted now some seventeen years ago, is a brilliant watch or rewatch for many of you reading here. She had a massive stroke and watched as her brain functions were affected: she speaks to the left and right hemispheres.
Movie: Songs of Earth | Official Trailer HD. Give a watch
A Norwegian documentary film–a slow meditative cinema gorgeous work of art made by writer & filmmaker Margreth Olin.
“Beneath the cool-blue glaciers, gushing waterfalls and crisp green deciduous trees, we hear the soft tick-tick of 84-year-old Jørgen's hiking poles as he cautiously navigates the boulders he encounters on his route. His daughter, director Margreth Olin, films him over the course of a year”
🌸🎶 Two Closing Songs: Songs I’m loving | Yo-Yo Ma & Alicia Keys
A fabulous listen: Yo-Yo Ma at sunrise Hanover, NH
🎹 Perhaps the Best Version out there of Empire State of Mind 🗽 (4:45 min)—The gorgeous ethereal voice of Alicia Keys playing piano, gorgeous one to send on, from iHeartRadio Concerts.
🎵 A Note: For those here in Chicago, good to know her musical, Hell's Kitchen, inspired by her own life and career in New York City— “a love story between a mother and a daughter.”
Describes “the experience of growing up in New York City, really chasing a dream, trying to find who you are, discovering your identity, and really following your heart, ultimately.” Playing November 11 - 30th 🍃
🌸🙏 Dedicate Merit | In all Mystical traditions, there is a closing prayer – prayers of blessing, gratitude and protection.
May what you love guided you
become a place of deep retreat to nourish your Soul
May you be devoted to Silence, let it take you wherever it wants to lead you.
May all be safe and protected from both inner and outer harm.
Have a blessed day,
Love, Wini 💖
🌸 ✨ Pass It On ✨
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The more voices of care in this community, in the world, the richer it becomes.
Help spread tender kindness and care out into the world.
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✨ may we bloom more Light.
💞 may we grow more Goodness for the healing of all.
🌎 may each of us stitch more heart-tenderness into the fabric of our planet.
….Until next week. 💖 ✨
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. - Mary Oliver
Website: https://www.wininimrod.com/
