12.15.2025. Silent Retreat
Hello dear Friends,
Today, December 15, No In-Person Metta Meditation Practice.
I’m on a silent retreat (please send blessings).
🍃
"Winter Storm Warning. 40 Miles From Location." I was driving into the city when I got the alert on my phone, immediately followed by another flashing red alert—this one from the dark alley of my own inner noise. Sometimes subtle, sometimes loud, yet always present: a low-grade, buzzing mind-chattering. Who doesn’t know this staticky one—the fickle roommate who has taken up residency, prime real estate in our heads? This one who loves to talk on and on, spins wild stories all day-and-night, and takes great delight in hearing their own voice babble.
"Isn't that just perfect,” this incessant voice in the passenger seat of my head said, “You are a winter storm warning."
Then the miraculous happened. Another voice rose in the solitude of my car. "Is that true, sweetheart?" A voice so tender, so forgiving, with an unwavering tone of credibility. A voice straightforward and gentle in speech, "Or are you a winter garden?"
Right there, on an ordinary day, driving down Devon Avenue in the city of Chicago, traveling with buses, cars, and two lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic in each direction—space opened, time stilled, and an old framework broke apart. Right there, in the middle of the road’s dashed yellow centerline, was a choice: to resuscitate or let die; to let the old stories, rooted in pattern, go or revive.
Right there, the touch of kindness, the years of placing my own hand on my own heart, wiring the soft press of metta (gentle friendliness) into my being—the practice of turning toward the self instead of against—sprouted roots and wings! (Metta—loving kindness—the antidote to fear, anxiety, and the negative, judgmental mind, the "enemy of human nature, St Ignatius calls it.)
This is a holy "amen." In the past, my inner default leaned towards unkind.
Then there is the practice of meeting the outer and inner blank page with compassion, too: writing over and over again love poems to the self; allowing the voice of soul to emerge, take a body, come into form through black ink, through marks on white paper, through listening to what's true on the heart.
Right there, on a bleak, cloud-covered, gray winter storm warning day, I found the Sacred now riding shotgun in my car—two dear friends, conversing, radiating oohs and aahs, spying winter gardens in bloom everywhere, myself included.
“To reteach a thing its loveliness is the nature of metta. Through lovingkindness, everyone and everything can flower again from within." — Sharon Salzberg
🍃
Closing with a heart of gratitude,
Love, Wini
PS. There will be Metta Meditation on Monday, December 22 at 2 p.m, and more goodness below, made with ♥️
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🌸 Two Poems:
I pull a poem to start my day. (It is a great practice, if it calls to you.) Below is the poem given (or pulled, depends on your view) to begin my six-day Silent Retreat—to keep as an offering prayer. The second poem offered here is one I have kept on my heart for now 30 years.
In Times Of Great Darkness | Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
You forgot where I want to do for you
what the sun does for me—
coax you to come
outside, to breathe in
the golden air.
I want to warm you
and enter you,
fill you with brilliance,
make your muscles melt,
make your mind shush.
I want to prepare for you
luminous paths
that span across deep space,
thaw any part of you
that feels frozen,
find any cracks
and slip shine into them.
I want to intensify
your shadow
so you might better know
your own shape.
I want to encourage you
to open, wider, wider,
want to teach you
to write your name
in light.
You Better Start Kissing Me | Hafiz
Throw away
All your begging bowls at God’s door,
For I have heard the Beloved
Prefers sweet threatening shouts,
Something in the order of:
“Hey, Beloved,
My heart is a raging volcano
Of love for you!
You better start kissing me—
Or Else!”
🌸 Three Quotes | Ilya Prigogine. Elie Wiesel. John Mark Comer.
"When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order". — Ilya Prigogine, Nobel-winning chemist
🍃 Amazing right!!! Scientifically proven that meditation groups like this Metta Monday Meditation Group can cause a significant shift in the current environment!!
Now that inspires, creates the ground of confidence for practice! (Sent my way via Lynn, a friend, inspiring me since high school! thank you!)
“This is what I say to the young Jewish boy wondering what I have done with his years…We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them…” — Elie Wiesel, Holocaust Survivor, 1986 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
“Solitude is when you set aside time to feed and water and nourish your soul. To let it grow into health and maturity. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the former” — John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry
🍃
🌸🎶 Two Closing Songs | Sent From Deirdre’s Heart to Mine. Sharing Here:
First Song:The Heartache Can Wait by Brandi Carlile (3:38 min)
Second Song: In the Bleak Midwinter by Loreena Mckennitt, from her album A Midwinter’s Night Dream
🌸🙏 Dedicate Merit | In all Mystical traditions, there is a closing prayer – prayers of blessing, gratitude and protection.
“May you be free from worry and fear.
May you be filled with loving-kindness
May you be healed and a source of healing.
May your heart be open.
May all beings be happy, healthy, and peaceful
Have a blessed day,
Love, Wini 💖
🌸 Housekeeping…xo
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Thank you, I am a one-woman, two-finger typing unfolding thousand petal-bloom.
Send on, add more light into our tender complex world.
✨ 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/
