From Acorn Into Oak Tree …

If you took a blue spruce tree and planted it in the desert, it would obviously perish. How do we forget that we too are living systems, and each of us have unique environments, needs, and conditions within which we flourish or wither?
— Dawna Markova from I Will Not Die an Unlived Life

 

You need not, and in fact cannot, teach an acorn to grow into an oak tree; but when given a chance, its intrinsic potentialities will develop. Similarly, the human individual, given a chance, tends to develop his particular human potentialities….In short, he will grow, substantially undiverted, toward self-realization.

Labyrinths: No Step Taken In Faith Is Wasted …

How far I have to go to find you in whom I have already arrived!
— Thomas Merton

 

Wayside Shrines

The difference between a labyrinth and a maze is that a labyrinth has no dead ends.

The famed eleven-circuit labyrinth inlaid in the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France has just one path, which takes the pilgrim in and out of four quadrants in a spiraling motion through dozens of left and right turns, before reaching its rosette center. Such a pattern invites meditation, and reminds the pilgrim the journey of faith is rarely a straightforward one.

Living Under The Blessing …

The great spiritual call of the Beloved Children of God is to pull their brokenness away from the shadow of the curse and put it under the light of the blessing. This is not as easy as it sounds. The power of the darkness around us is strong, and our world finds it easier to manipulate self-rejecting people than self-accepting people. But when we keep listening attentively to the voice calling us the Beloved, it becomes possible to live our brokenness, not as a confirmation of our fear that we are worthless, but as an opportunity to purify and deepen the blessing that rests upon us. Physical, mental, or emotional pain lived under the blessing is experienced in ways radically different from physical, mental, or emotional pain lived under the curse.

Give Up All The Other Worlds Except The One To Which You Belong (New Year’s Eve) …

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.
―David Whyte from The House of Belonging

 

The Subtle Art of Detachment

We are like children building a sand castle. We embellish it with beautiful shells, bits of driftwood, and pieces of colored glass. The castle is ours, off limits to others. We’re willing to attack if others threaten to hurt it. Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sand castle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea.

Advent Meditation: The Darkness (Winter Solstice) …

Begin here.

Say that you have chosen it.

Say that it was your own hand that
turned out the light, your own mouth that blew out the candle,
your own eyes that closed themselves
against the brightness.

Say it was your doing.

Advent Meditation: Threshold Of Winter …

Quiet me within,
Clothe my body in peacefulness,
That your Word
Once again may take flesh –
This time, within me –
As it did in holy Mary,
Long Advent days ago.
— Edward Hays from Prayers for a Planetary Pilgrim

 

The Growing Edge

Look well to the growing edge! All around us worlds are dying and new worlds are being born; All around us life is dying and life is being born. The fruit ripens on the tree; the roots are silently at work in the darkness of the earth against a time when there shall be new leaves, fresh blossoms, green fruit. Such is the growing edge! … This is the basis of hope in moments of despair, the incentive to carry on when times are out of joint and [people] have lost their reason, the source of confidence when worlds crash and dreams whiten into ash. The birth of the child — life’s most dramatic answer to death — this is the growing edge incarnate.  Look well to the growing edge!
— Howard Thurman

The new thing that God seeks often occurs in times of disruption, when the familiar world has collapsed and the future is in doubt, when days grow shorter, and we wonder if darkness will swallow the light.  The new thing that is being born in our lives emerges out of the hidden womb and the dark soil.  God’s new thing is the vision of “something more,” a hovering possibility that challenges the world as it is. It is the moral arc toward which history bends, filling us with a divine restlessness with the way things are that inspires the quest for what may be if the world embraces God’s vision of Shalom.

Life’s Beautiful Uncertainty …

Maybe happiness is not about us, as individuals.
Maybe it is not something that arrives into us.
Maybe happiness is felt heading out, not in.
Maybe happiness is not about what we deserve because we’re worth it.
Maybe happiness is not about what we can get.
Maybe happiness is about what we already have.
Maybe happiness is about what we can give.
Maybe happiness is not a butterfly we can catch with a net.
Maybe there is no certain way to be happy.
Maybe there are only maybes.
If (as Emily Dickinson said) ‘Forever — is composed of Nows — ‘, maybe the nows are made of maybes.
Maybe the point of life is to give up certainty and to embrace life’s beautiful uncertainty.
— Matt Haig from Notes On A Nervous Planet

Fear is not your enemy. It is a compass pointing you to the areas where you need to grow.
— Steve Pavlina from The Courage to Live Consciously