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Dec 31

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Aspirations, Intentions, Actions

“An unintentional life accepts everything and does nothing. An intentional life embraces only the things that will add to the mission of significance.” – John C Maxwell

“We either live with intention or exist by default.” – Kristin Armstrong

New Year’s Eve resolutions
Shifting to aspirations, intentions, actions
To keep growing and deepening
To not know everything so I can keep learning and unlearning
To be generous and kind
To enter familiar rooms with fresh eyes
To ask more questions and listen
To quiet and seek discernment
To slow for reflection then dive in with resolve
To say no more making room for yes to the right things
To see and welcome joy and gratitude during challenges, roadblocks and detours
To pursue awe, wonder, delight, inquiry, discovery, connection
To deepen trust, faith, patience
To receive grace, light, love
And give it away with abandon
Aspirations to keep becoming and unfolding
Intentions to focus time and attention
Daily actions to move aspirations and intentions into motion
Direction, aim, fire
Repeat.

“Action expresses priorities.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Dec 30

Brilliant, Bright, Becoming, Daily

“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“Growing up, I never knew a relaxed woman. Successful women? Yes. Productive women? Plenty. Anxious and afraid and apologetic women? Heaps of them. But relaxed women? At-ease women? Women who don’t dissect their days into half hour slots of productivity? Women who prioritize rest and pleasure and play? Women who aren’t afraid to take up space in the world? Women who give themselves unconditional permission to relax? Without guilt? Without apology? Without feeling like they need to earn it? I’m not sure I’ve ever met a woman like that. But I would like to become one.”― Nicola Jane Hobbs

To becoming
Daily
Imperfectly, beautifully
To unfolding and unfurling
Slowly and surely
From bud to bloom, again and again
Seasons and cycles
Transitions to transformations
Planting, feeding, harvesting
Waiting and arriving
To aim and focus on what matters most
Loving every version of ourselves and others too
To failure because it shows we are still trying
To getting back up and swinging at the ball again and again
As we continue to grow, deepen and become
With all the detours, delays and wanderings
Awake, aware and grateful for it all.

“This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”― George Bernard Shaw

Dec 29

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Light Remains, Carry It Forward

“If you are the light, you cast away the darkness.” – ManHee Lee

“As this year draws to its end,
We give thanks for the gifts it brought
And how they became inlaid within
Where neither time nor tide can touch them…

Days when beloved faces shone brighter
With light from beyond themselves;
And from the granite of some secret sorrow
A stream of buried tears loosened.
We bless this year for all we learned,
For all we loved and lost
And for the quiet way it brought us
Nearer to our invisible destination.”
– John O’Donohue

May these last days of the year be filled with reflection and gratitude.
Resilience and awe.
Praise and wonder.
Hope and anticipation.
New beginnings.
Moving forward with what is necessary and leaving the rest.
Light. Peace. Love.
Carry it forward.

“Listen to the inner light; it will guide you. Listen to the inner peace; it will feed you. Listen to the inner love; it will transform you.” – Sri Chinmoy

Dec 28

Firing Up the Landscape

“Prayer is a small fire lit to keep cold hands warm. Prayer is a practice that flourishes both with faith and doubt. Prayer is asking, and prayer is sitting. Prayer is the breath. Prayer is not an answer, always, because not all questions can be answered.”― Pádraig Ó Tuama, Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community

Red Bird by Mary Oliver

“Red bird came all winter
Firing up the landscape
As nothing else could.
Of course I love the sparrows,
Those dun-colored darlings,
So hungry and so many.
I am a God-fearing feeder of birds,
I know he has many children,
Not all of them bold in spirit.
Still, for whatever reason-
Perhaps because the winter is so long
And the sky so black-blue,
Or perhaps because the heart narrows
As often as it opens-
I am grateful
That red bird comes all winter
Firing up the landscape
As nothing else can do.”

On the way but not arrived
Space between ending and beginning
Hallway between rooms
In this quiet space between the end of the year and the beginning of the new
Holiday hurrying to winter slowing
Reflect and frame
Slow and discard
Plan and allow
Gratitude and grace
Color brighter on the backdrop of the season
Red birds pause
Firing up the landscape
Look around.

“The only place to begin is where I am, and whether by desire or disaster, I am here. My being here is not dependent on my recognition of the fact. I am here anyway. But it might help if I could learn to look around.”― Pádraig Ó Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World

Dec 27

Crossing Over

“He who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass.”― George Herbert

“At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me…”― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

What will I lay down to enter the new year ahead, to enter this fresh day?
Not more
Less and deeper
Richness and connection
Purpose and meaning
Joy and delight
Clear the decks, discard, release, let go
Create space and capacity
To pick up the good and travel lightly
Open arms and heart
To embrace and be held
Mercy, love, forgiveness
To give and receive
Build and cross the bridge.

“What if we just started with the idea that all of us want to swim in mercy, love, and forgiveness?” – Father Greg Boyle

Dec 26

Joy Before You

“We are never far from wonders.” – John Green

“May your walls know joy, may every room hold laughter, and every window open to great possibility.”— Mary Anne Radmacher

Weave slow into this day.
Wander too.
For reflection, laughter, joy.
In being, not mere doing.
To be present, we deepen time, bloom gratitude.
Remember how to live.

“Practicing presence is remembering how to live.”― Heidi Barr, 12 Tiny Things: Simple Ways to Live a More Intentional Life

Dec 25

Divine Above and Below Meet

“Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.” – Norman Vincent

“One way of viewing the rest of that lit baby’s life is to note how he used the light in him to spot the light in everything else: not just birds of the air and lilies of the field but also shushed children, disabled beggars, foreign soldiers, and defiant women, among many others. He made the ordinary luminous by noticing what was happening right where he was and calling others to notice it too. When time ran out, he sealed his teaching by shining light on the simple acts of washing feet and sharing supper with his friends.

Whatever more his birth story means, it means an end to any estrangement between the Divine Above and the Divine Below. The light goes both ways. Heaven and nature sing.” – Barbara Brown Taylor

May this Christmas Day be the one that you say Yes!
Like Mary did.
Like children do everyday.
Without delay or pause.
Yes to joy, hope, peace, grace, awe, wonder, beauty, love.
The gift and the giver.
Merry Christmas.

A BLESSING FOR CHRISTMAS DAY by Kate Bowler

“God, this is a kind of magic
the way this day shines so strangely,
how it sparkles beyond our understanding.

But, somehow, this day
never fails to awaken a longing
to love well—or at least better—
all those here with us, and those far away,
and to remember with gratitude
those now gone, gone, gone and missed.

What is this mystery?

Our God who set the world spinning
should come down for this one reason:
to love us into a newness.
Not for gain, nor our capitalist fantasies,
but the hope that freely, lavishly,
that we might learn to see, feel, and live Christ’s love.
Thank you.
Christ the Giver and the Gift.”

Dec 24

To Be Interrupted

“We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.”― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“…And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.”― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas

To be interrupted
From old thoughts
Narrow views
Our own way
Busy and speed
To awaken to beauty, grace, joy
Slow and stillness
Awe and wonder
Reverence and praise
To be interrupted
Traveling a new path
Of love without condition, the only kind.

“God travels wonderful ways with human beings, but he does not comply with the views and opinions of people. God does not go the way that people want to prescribe for him; rather, his way is beyond all comprehension, free and self-determined beyond all proof. Where reason is indignant, where our nature rebels, where our piety anxiously keeps us away: that is precisely where God loves to be. There he confounds the reason of the reasonable; there he aggravates our nature, our piety—that is where he wants to be, and no one can keep him from it. Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that he does wonders where people despair, that he takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.”― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas

Dec 23

Earth and Sky Collide

“each morning,
the sun reminds us:
with the darkest
moment comes
a restoration
of the light.”
― Heidi Barr, Cold Spring Hallelujah

“When earth and sky collide, it’s a dance older than time.”― Heidi Barr, Collisions of Earth and Sky

A right turn off a familiar path
Leading into unknown territory
Beauty, light, stillness
Amidst the ordinary
Astonishment and delight
Restoration and reset
Wander, wonder, awe
The gifts of nature
Stray off path, get lost to be found
Nature calls
Run, join the dance

“What i want in life
is an aptitude for astonishment
room for unanticipated delight.”― Heidi Barr, Cold Spring Hallelujah

Dec 22

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Room at the Inn

“An artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.”― Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World

“At Christmas, time deepens. The Celtic imagination knew that time is eternity in disguise. They embraced the day as a sacred space. Christmas reminds us to glory in the simplicity and wonder of one day; it unveils the extraordinary that our hurried lives conceal and neglect. We have been given such immense possibilities. We desperately need to make clearances in our entangled lives to let our souls breathe. We must take care of ourselves and especially of our suffering brothers and sisters.” – John O’Donohue

To make clearances.
Sacred space, brilliant sky, wide-open fields.
Time still, steeping, deepening.
To witness and partake.
Awe, wonder, beauty woven in this very day.
Make room at the inn of your heart.
Invite, open, welcome.
Let it find you.

“Our task is not to somehow inject God into our work but to join God in the work he is already doing in and through our vocational lives.”― Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

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