TATV GRAL

TATV GRAL – “So Divine”

“So Divine” was originally written in the early 1990s.
In the 2000s, I reshaped the melody and reworked the lyrics—drawing from material by Damion Davis—into a personal meditation on enduring darkness and rediscovering the divine spark within, through transformation and trial.

Today, the song has entered another life.
It now functions as a prayer: an offering for someone I love who is struggling with addiction—a call toward the inner light that remains, even when it feels most obscured.

“So don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all that you do.
You must think that something is happening within you, something that is still becoming.

Life has not forgotten you.
It holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.
Why would it need you otherwise?

Ask yourself whether your former life has not withdrawn from you, whether it has not become poor.

Why do you want to exclude, drive out, or lose your states of depression,
since you do not know what work they are doing in you?
Why do you want to persecute your troubles as though they were enemies,
when they are perhaps the things that most deeply teach you?

So be patient with everything that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves,
like locked rooms and like books written in a very foreign tongue.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

From Letters to a Young Poet, Letter VIII (Dec 19, 1903), by Rainer Maria Rilke

Caspar David Friedrich
Monk by the Sea (Der Mönch am Meer)
Year: 1808–1810
Medium: Oil on canvas

At the Still Point of the Sun

At the deepest hinge of the year,
when the Sun pauses
and the world holds its breath,
we gather.

Not to banish the dark,
but to sit with it—
to listen
to what has been lost,
what has been carried too long,
what still aches for light.

We remember the names.
Those who have crossed the threshold,
those taken by sorrow, violence, forgetting, or time.
May they be held
in the wide arms of Earth,
their stories carried forward
like embers in the soil.

We speak forgiveness—
not as erasure,
but as loosening.
Forgiveness for what we could not save,
for words never spoken,
for harms done in fear or confusion.
May what is heavy be set down,
even if only a little.

We pray for the living—
for those at risk,
for bodies in pain,
for spirits worn thin by grief and uncertainty.
May courage return where hope has dimmed.
May care find its way back
into our hands and hearts.

As the light turns again,
not suddenly, not triumphantly,
but slowly—
may something in us also turn.
May we tend the small flame,
the quiet resolve
to protect life,
to remember one another,
to walk gently upon this Earth.

At the still point of the Sun,
we offer our voices,
our silence,
our breath—
to the living world,
and to the Soul of the World,
that life may continue.

Black on Gray
Artist: Mark Rothko
Date: 1969

Feeling grateful today. Wishing you all a peaceful Thanksgiving. 🖤🍂

“And into the forest I go, to lose my myself and find my soul.”
— Mariah Danu

Reading Navaho Symbols of Healing while spending time on Ojibwe land this week.
Letting the pines, the quiet water, and the cold air slow everything down.
Grateful to be in a place where the land teaches simply by being itself.
🌲✨