Walks with Beauty

Hello out there. While my given name is Charlie Finn, I have other names including the title of this blog. Back on October 23, 1997 (dates are important to me) as I was driving up to DC from my home near Fincastle, Virginia, and listening to Dances with Wolves on tape, I got to wondering what new name would fit me? What name, in other words, could I imagine Native Americans or Great Spirit giving me? That’s when Walks with Beauty came to me, and it’s felt a part of my identity since.

So when my wife Penny suggested Walks with Beauty might be a better blog title than Mystic Musings from Cor Mundi (which is what I had come up with), it felt right to go with it. She knows me well and I’ve learned to trust her instincts. Cor Mundi, by the way, is what we call our home and thirteen acres, truly the heart of our world.

I see this blog as inviting conversations with like-spirited others. Few things are more reaffirming than discovering kinship. So here’s a question for spirit kin to muse on. What name might you imagine the spirit of the universe wanting to give you, that seems somehow to touch on a matter of essence, on something at the core of you? Don’t try figuring it out so much as just pondering it, allowing to rise to the surface something percolating beneath. And if you would like to share it here, great. I’ll end for now with a poem not unrelated to walking with beauty. Let me know if it resonates.

Before You Disappear
When you’ve had a crappy day,
feel a combination peevish and pitiful,
long to disappear into the nearest distraction, drug,
or best of all sleep,
may you spy the moon,
hear a bird,
stroke a cat,
smell a flower,
hold a child,
remember a friend
long enough to reconsider
if you still want to disappear.