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Posts from the ‘Mindfulness’ Category

Mar 17

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The Wholeness of this Day

“God does not erase our losses, those empty places in our lives, but he does something almost more miraculous. He fills the loss with a sign of his presence.”― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“If I want to abide in this day, to make my home in it, I must only tear my eyes from tomorrow and look around. For there is a wholeness to this day that I do not want to miss.”― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

Root and reach.
Rest and flow.
Ease and effort.
Find the sacred holy ground of this day.
Remain here to notice, to pay attention.
In deep long gazes.
In the lift from laughter.
In the small adding up to a good life, moments at a time.
And for honed senses to witness and partake in the present.

“Our lives are stories built of small moments. Ordinary experiences. It is too easy to forget that our days are adding up to something astonishing. We do not often stop to notice the signs and wonders. The writing on the wall. But some days we do.”― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

Jan 29

Ten Times

“Listen, whatever you see and love—
that’s where you are.”― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs: Poems

“Ten times a day something happens to me like this – some strengthening throb of amazement – some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.”― Mary Oliver

Ten, maybe even twenty.
But start with ten and see where it goes.
Ten still points, pauses, stop signs.
Look around longer with fresh eyes, open heart.
Amazement. Wonder. Delight.
Praise. Gratitude. Reverence.
Ten, maybe even twenty. Or more.
Attention. Awareness. Awaken.

“Sometimes I dream
that everything in the world is here, in my room,
in a great closet, named and orderly,

and I am here too, in front of it,
hardly able to see for the flash and the brightness—
and sometimes I am that madcap person clapping my hands and singing;
and sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees.”
― Mary Oliver

Jan 8

To Wonder, To Wander

“You have the power to live in the now despite that inner nudge pushing you out of the moment toward perfection and productivity.” – Rachel Macy Stafford, Hands Free Life

“…which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider’s, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?”― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

What causes you to wonder?
Go there each day for a visit.
As close as a walk, the sky, a glance.
Creating rather than production.
Imperfect effort over perfect stasis.
Wander, pause, allow.
Be filled with awe.
Completely awake and thrown out of the nest of complacency and busyness.
Feed yourself, feed the world.
Wonder, awe, delight to you this day.
Found in the wandering and the wondering.

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.”― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance

Dec 17

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The Slow Work

“The whole life lies in the verb seeing.”― Teilhard de Chardin

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal — a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.” – Mary Oliver, House of Light

May inspiration lead to motion.
Love to action.
Seeing as if for the first time.
Slow steady work.
Currents always moving.
Some seasons on the shoreline.
To ready for reentry.
Whether we see it or not, we are changing.
We either resist or succumb to the unfolding within.
Make yourself a light.
Heed the call, the whisper.
Emergence at work.

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Aug 16

Slow and Easy

“Slow down and enjoy life. It’s not only the scenery you miss by going to fast – you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.” – Eddie Cantor

“It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.”― Rollo May

Slow down.
Let your imagination saunter and wander.
Allow quiet spaces to hear your own voice.
Anchor in today.
See beauty and light.
There’s fun to be had.
Play to partake in.
Slow and easy.

“What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?”― Rollo May

Jul 19

Revery

“Where there are bees there are flowers, and wherever there are flowers there is new life and hope.”― Christy Lefteri, The Beekeeper of Aleppo

“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

We are onto the next thing before the thing before us is barely started or over.
Passing by quickly in search of what’s next.
As if we could find it when we can’t see the bounty that is already before us.
In loss, we miss what we already had.
No do overs.
Live twice.
Once in the moment.
Again in the memory.
Be where you are right now fully.
In the imperfection, beauty, messiness and awe.
Reverence. Wonder. Revery.

“Mindfulness is simply being aware of what is happening right now without wishing it were different.” – James Baraz

Jul 17

Timeless As Bird’s Wings

“Timelessness is an art.”― Richie Norton

“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.”― Jelaluddin Rumi , The Essential Rumi

I forgot the charger for my watch this weekend on a mini-escape up north.
My “smart” watch that tracks time, my steps, progress to goal.
Entering timelessness for two days.
No place to be at a certain time.
No tracking of steps or progress.
Suspended and steeped in now-ness.
Lose track of time now and then.
Enter simple moments.
Open to beauty that is all around.
Nothing to track but the present.
Contracting and expanding.
Breathing.

“The timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness. And knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.”― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

Jun 11

Slow Down, Repeat

“As you slow down, you instantly enter into a brand new world.”― Hiral Nagda

“Strange, what being forced to slow down could do to a person.”― Nicholas Sparks, The Last Song

In the hustle
In the hurry
The blur and flurry
Surface and skimming by
We miss the essence of life
Slow down
The nuance
The beauty
The depth and expanse
Slow down
Pause
Take a deep breath
More often than not
Each day, each hour, this moment
Slow down
Exhale, inhale, sit still
In the softness of a long glance
In the margins
Slow down
Gentle pace
Lovely place and space
Stay here awhile, be made new
The magnitude of quietude
Slow down…repeat.

“Sometimes I think there are only two instructions we need to follow to develop and deepen our spiritual life: slow down and let go.”― Oriah Mountain Dreamer, The Dance: Moving To the Rhythms of Your True Self

May 28

Keen Awareness

“Ordinary love, anonymous and unnoticed as it is, is the substance of peace on earth, the currency of God’s grace in our daily life.”― Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

In the economy of the day
Of a life which is made up of the accumulation of days
In what we choose to do and not to do
In plans, in detours, delays, and in what just happens
May each of us have a keen awareness of the details in the present as well as the 10,000 foot view to see the expanse
To be grateful, joyful, even in the struggles, especially then
Senses sharpened, awareness sharp, grace overflowing.

“God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by subtracting” — Meister Eckhart

May 25

Small Bits

“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

“The new life into which we are baptized is lived out in days, hours, and minutes. God is forming us into a new people. And the place of that formation is in the small moments of today.”― Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

Feeling flat?
In a rut?
Is there more?
Someday when.
Remember when.
When, when, when.
Turn off auto-pilot.
Wake up and dive in.
Beneath the surface, more than skimming.
Participate and play.
Ordinary days.
We are steeped in beauty.
Overflowing in possibilities.
Pay attention, notice, enter the grace of small bits, sacred ground.

“…small bits of our day are profoundly meaningful because they are the site of our worship. The crucible of our formation is in the monotony of our daily routines.”― Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

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