“To lean into life requires a quiet courage that lets us find our aliveness. And the reward for leaning into life is that everything hidden becomes sweet and colorful. Or more, we’re finally present enough to receive the sweetness and color that is always there. Consider how a flower opens. It doesn’t prepare for a particular moment but stays true to a life of opening and leaning toward the light. When a flower blossoms, it turns inside out and wears its beauty in the world. In just this way, a soul opens over a lifetime of leaning into life.”— The Book of Soul: 52 Paths to Living What Matters by Mark Nepo
“Blessed Are You Who Bear the Light He came as a witness to testify to the light.—John 1: 7 Blessed are you who bear the light in unbearable times, who testify to its endurance amid the unendurable, who bear witness to its persistence when everything seems in shadow and grief. Blessed are you in whom the light lives, in whom the brightness blazes—your heart a chapel, an altar where in the deepest night can be seen the fire that shines forth in you in unaccountable faith, in stubborn hope, in love that illumines every broken thing it finds.”— Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons by Jan Richardson
We don’t “nail” every day. Some days we stumble, fumble and go off course. Detours and delays are woven into the journey. Detach, embrace, move through and keep going. Moments become lifetimes so invest well.
When stuck in a rut, go in the opposite direction. If bound by spiraling thoughts, get outside your head, read poetry, examine a flower. If overwhelmed by the noise of the world, go in, seek and read your soul, that soft voice that calls you home. In and out.
Back and forth. Float and dive. Right and left. The pendulum of life swings. Remain steady, venture out, observe, anchor, sail, grow, shift, breathe, break patterns, create new connections.
From bulb, to breaking dirt, to bud, to bloom. The flower reaches up, unfolds and bursts with beauty in due time. Remain present in all seasons, steeped in wonder, anchored in gratitude and open to the grace of joy hidden in each moment. The perspective of a flower – look up.
“Given our entanglements, one of the most difficult acts of presence is not to vanish when overwhelmed by conflict or hardship. The simplest teachers in nature, such as the sun, the birds, and the flowers, are quietly heroic in this regard, not because they achieve anything, but because they remain completely true to their own nature, regardless of what happens to them.”— The Book of Soul: 52 Paths to Living What Matters by Mark Nepo
