Resources and Links from Francis Weller Webinar

Resources and links from the webinar with Francis Weller, April 10, 2020.

Go to the Limits of Your Longing
Rainer Maria Rilke

Listen
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.

Book of Hours, I 59

Kindness
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

***

Commonweal Resilience Project

Commonweal’s Healing Circles Global

Michael Lerner’s blog, Angle of Vision

Beyond Conventional Cancer Therapies webpage on COVID-19 resources

Commonweal’s resources for COVID-19 (offerings from a variety of our programs)

An article about Sweden’s approach to COVID-19

Ariadne Labs, simple and clear conversation starter for what people want related to ventilation, etc. if very sick with COVID-19.

Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine (ACIM) has great Covid coping resources

UCSF has online workshops to help guide with advanced care planning: MERI.ucsf.edu