Bend like the limb of a peach tree. 
Tend to those who need help. 
Disappear three days with the moon. 

Don't pray to be healed, or look for evidence 
of "some other world." 
You are the soul 
and medicine for what wounds the soul. 

GIVE BIRTH SLOWLY 

A New Moon teaches gradualness 
and deliberation and how one gives birth 
to oneself slowly. Patience with small details 
makes perfect a large work, like the universe. 

What nine months of attention does for an embryo 
forty early mornings will do 
for your gradually growing wholeness. 

                    --Rumi

My life has long been filled with tending to those who need help.  The past several years have compelled me to learn flexibility—many days, now, I actually observe something of the grace and resilience of the peach tree in myself.  The neglected element in my life—as in so many of our lives—is the disappearing.

I have always had a strong need for retreat time.  I am so porous to other humans, so readily moved by what moves through them.  Spending so much time in intimate contact with other two-leggeds provokes a powerful need to withdraw, to digest, to let go, to be nourished by communion with my non-human relations, with Mother Earth and Great Spirit. 

Our action- and production-oriented culture places no value on retreat, on withdrawal, on silence and solitude.  The idea of “giving birth to oneself slowly” is anathema to a culture dedicated to quick money, quick fixes, and a steady diet of superficial distractions we’ve learned to call “pleasure.”  This profound distortion in our culture distorts our notions of service; those of us who resonate with the suffering of the world, who feel called to offer service in response, may have a very difficult time knowing when to stop.  As the ecological, economic and political situation on he planet intensifies, many of us find ourselves racing to try to keep up, struggling to give more and more in response to the pain we feel more and more acutely.

Rumi’s poem reminds us that there is another way to serve, another way to heal.  Each of us is “the soul, and medicine for what wounds the soul.”  We don’t have to do more and more in order to respond to the suffering of the world; we are the suffering of the world, and also the balm for the suffering.

This month—this weekend, in fact—I begin a practice of “disappearing three days with the moon” each month.  For three days around the New Moon, I will cease working, withdraw from my family, and spend time in solitude—meditating, doing yoga, walking in the woods, dreaming, dancing and singing.  I will eat little and talk less.  I have hungered for this practice for years, and it still takes great courage to stick to it, to say “no” to all the outer things I want to and feel I should do on these days, to say “no” to all the people who want me to help them in more concrete ways.  I offer this practice in the service of all of us, that we may all give birth to ourselves slowly, and in so doing, contribute to the perfection of this slowly unfolding universe.