connection – Alison Leigh Lilly

In Praise of Boring Sex

October 30, 2013September 23, 2019 Alison Leigh Lilly

I wasn't exactly having any raging hot sex in my mid-twenties. What intimacy there was to be snatched between caffeine-addled swing shifts was difficult and desperate, and always over too soon. Why should love be so hard? The world seemed full of impervious surfaces -- concrete, steel and glass -- against which there was nothing to do but rip myself ruthlessly open to the possibility of contact. To make the foolhardy choice to stay soft and tattered; to refuse to be ground smooth into something polished, invulnerable, inhuman. To choose, each time, to throw myself once more into the harsh, cold waters where the restless waves broke against the rocks. Which might be why, these days, I am still so often surprised by the utter heart-wrenching gentleness of quiet, boring sex. It is a blessing I am still getting used to.

Contemplation & Meditation, Holy Wild, Pagan Blog Project 2013

Lectio Divina: Reading the Book of Nature

June 7, 2013September 23, 2019 Alison Leigh Lilly

When we see nature itself as a constantly-unfolding story about the deepest, most sacred truths of life and death, we can adapt the practice of Lectio Divina as a creative approach to meditation that can strengthen our relationship with the earth. Here are just a few ideas about how to use the practice of Lectio Divina to engage with the stories of nature. Although we can approach each of the four stages of Lectio Divina as distinct activities that we can do one at a time on their own, we experience the most benefit from this kind of spiritual work when we bring them together into a single coherent, continuous practice.

Muse in Brief

Naming the Water: Human and Deity Identity from an Earth-Centered Perspective » No Unsacred Place

August 8, 2012September 23, 2019 Alison Leigh Lilly

In my latest post over on No Unsacred Place, I respond to Teo Bishop's recent musings over at Bishop in the Grove, in which he contemplates hard polytheism and ancestor reverence, and the problematic issues of self-identity that might arise when we imagine our descendants worshipping us as gods: "As a Pagan, my theology is rooted firmly in the earth. To me, the earth is sacred, and so the ecological truths that guide and shape life on this tiny blue marble are sacred truths. One of those truths is that identity is fluid. I can no more name the discrete entity that is “me” than I can name the water flowing in a river. From moment to moment, that identity changes. This was the insight of the Buddhists, too: we are not the same person from one second to the next, and reincarnation is less like viscous soul-substance getting sloshed from one meat-container into the next as it is like a flame passing from one wick to another. Is it the same flame? Yes… and then again, no. ..."