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Oct 9

Altars and Cathedrals, Front and Center

“Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.”― Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

“What is saving my life now is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth. My life depends on engaging the most ordinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them. My life depends on ignoring all touted distinctions between the secular and the sacred, the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul. What is saving my life now is becoming more fully human, trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world.”― Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

Altars and cathedrals
Sacred ground
Hidden front and center
On the ground beneath
Ordinary days
We search, seek, chase in far off places and fictional “someday when…”
Pay attention
Plant seeds on your path today
Tend, water,
Cast light.

“Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.”― Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

Oct 8

Wild and Wondering

“Blessed are the wonderers with the courage to live into the questions. Seems to me that sooner or later, whether we like the outcome or not, theirs is the answer.”― Sarah Bessey, Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith

“May we be…the ones who hold our opinions loosely and yet love ferociously.”― Sarah Bessey, Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith

Curiosity before judgment
Unknowing to broaden, widen, deepen
Inquiry and listening
Abiding and witnessing
Wild, wandering, wondering
Love well, small ways, noticing, tending
Cast light

“Sometimes our most holy calling is to listen, to bear witness.”― Sarah Bessey, Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith

Oct 7

Roots, Shoots, Fruits

“A tree is known by its fruit; a man by his deeds. A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love.” – Saint Basil

“You can’t change the fruits without changing the roots” – H.L. Mencken

Blue skies
Rushing river
In all seasons and circumstances
Seed daily both on fertile and dry soil
Some with take, some will blow away, some may take time
Roots firm, shoot sure, fruit harvested
Be kind
Thoughts, words, actions
Plant kindness, gather love.
Cast light.

“Love is a fruit in season at all times, and within reach of every hand.” – Mother Teresa

Oct 6

Slow, Flow, Grow

“Love has the shape and feel of water. It is simultaneously flexible and powerful. It can adapt and roar; it can also be silently nourishing.”― Yung Pueblo, How to Love Better

“Slowing down is how you ground yourself. It is how you reconnect with your peace and intuition. Slowing down helps you understand yourself and other people. Slowing down opens the door to deeper learning. It is how you reaffirm the way you want to show up in the world. Slowing down is necessary if you want to live intentionally. It is the only way you can make sure that you are moving in the right direction.”― Yung Pueblo, How to Love Better

In the pause, attention
In the flow, communion
In the slow, presence
In the praise, reverence
In this day, devotion
In the connection, love
Slow, flow, grow.

“Going with the flow does not mean you sit back passively and expect everything to work out. Going with the flow means you don’t cause yourself stress by fighting changes that are out of your control.”― Yung Pueblo, How to Love Better

Oct 5

Beauty of Faith Everblooming

“Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.”- Saint Augustine

“I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.”― Madeleine L’Engle

Heights and depths
Smooth and stumbling
God always present
Close as breath
Unexpected, showing up in so many ways
In others, encounters, a blooming flower
Bigger and more creative than our thoughts and imagination
Knowing in the unknowing
Loved beyond measure
Beauty of faith everblooming.

“Just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean that the explanation doesn’t exist.”― Madeleine L’Engle

Oct 4

Seek and Listen

“if you will go where you’ve never gone before, you will see God like you’ve never seen him before.”― Annie F. Downs, Let’s All Be Brave: Living Life with Everything You Have

“When you take the time to draw on your listening-imagination, you will begin to hear this gentle voice at the heart of your life. It is deeper and surer than all the other voices of disappointment, unease, self-criticism and bleakness. All holiness is about learning to hear the voice of your own soul. It is always there and the more deeply you learn to listen, the greater surprises and discoveries that will unfold. To enter into the gentleness of your own soul changes the tone and quality of your life. Your life is no longer consumed by hunger for the next event, experience or achievement. You learn to come down from the treadmill and walk on the earth. You gain a new respect for yourself and others and you learn to see how wonderfully precious this one life is. You begin to see through the enchanting veils of illusion that you had taken for reality. You no longer squander yourself on things and situations that deplete your essence. You know now that your true source is not outside you. Your soul is your true source and a new energy and passion awakens in you. John O’Dononhue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

Seek
Inquire
Listen
Respond
Cathedrals of the soul.

“But for us the road unfurls itself, we don’t stop walking, we know there is far to go. ”― Denise Levertov

Oct 3

Apple-Flavored Skies

“Bean finds the best apple in our tree and hands it up to me. “You know what this tastes like when you first bite into it?” she asks.
“No, what?”
“Blue sky.”
“You’re zoomed.”
“You ever eat blue sky?”
“No,” I admit.
“Try it sometime,” she says. “It’s apple-flavored.”― Rodman Philbrick, The Last Book in the Universe

Ode to Autumn by John Keats

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, –
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”

Crisp air, apples too
Blue skies
Get out of your head
Into the world
Beauty to be found
Soak up this day
Abundant autumn
Poetry abound.

“Hang on to your youthful enthusiasms — you’ll be able to use them better when you’re older.”― Seneca

 

Oct 2

Sowing, Tending, Reaping

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” – Simone Weil

“I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
And all my sowre-sweet dayes
I will lament, and love.” – George Herbert

Praise
Approve
Sowing
Love
To do these first, second, third
In the wilderness or plenty
Manna for this day.

“This entire planet is about wilderness, but God is about manna. The journey of life is not a matter of finding our way out of the wilderness but finding the manna inside the wilderness.”― Annie F. Downs, Remember God

Oct 1

Ablaze in Song

“Light burdens, long borne, grow heavy.”― George Herbert

“Loving earth, more of love flows out of me,
for in the leaves is music, in the flowers, a poem,
In the trees is a story of centuries of storms,
endured and stayed as secrets of ages.”
― Jayita Bhattacharjee

Leaves ablaze in song
Celebration of work well-done
Beauty, hope, joy given
Transition to transformation
Soon to releasing, letting go, soft float to the earth
For rest to restoration
Making space for new growth
The gift of seasons.

“In every change, in every falling leaf there is some pain, some beauty. And that’s the way new leaves grow.”― Amit Ray

Sep 30

Deep Dive, Surface Anew

“A great ship asks deep water.”― George Herbert

“By all means use sometimes to be alone.
Salute thyself: see what thy soul doth wear.
Dare to look in thy chest; for ’tis thine own:
And tumble up and down what thou find’st there.
Who cannot rest till he good fellows find,
He breaks up house, turns out of doors his mind.”
― George Herbert, The Temple: The Poetry of George Herbert

Within
Inquiry and revelation
Deep waters
Surety of tide
Rhythm and rhyme
Surface anew, bouy
In and out
Like breath
Close up and pull back
Ground to horizon
Shift in view
Give and receive
Conductor of this day
What will you compose?

“Peace, prattler.”― George Herbert

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