SPREAD SOME FREEDOM AROUND TODAY

Let the ripples created by your life today be a calming presence to others, maybe for just one. But you know what? When the dance of one person's life changes, it changes the dance for many others just by it changing. Ease some pain. It might just be a moment in someone's life that is like the swinging open of a door that has been locked down shut for a long time keeping them from really feeling loved, and feeling noticed, and feeling cared for. It might just be the thing that brings a long enduring storm to its end.

THE MYSTERY AND A NEWNESS TO LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS

When one steps outside the ready made explanations used to define what life is all about, the narratives that were waiting for us when we arrived in this place, life...being here...takes on a strange newness. Even within all the different narratives that exist from culture to culture, tribe to tribe, if one allows themselves the freedom to listen with an open mind and heart to the narratives different than the one they are acquainted, life really does begin to seem mysteriously wonderful and maybe even frightful. 

But what if you went even a bit farther? What if you were to consider stepping outside all the explanations, instead of what is most often practiced....jumping from/abandoning one, only to swap it for another one that is already wrapped up, defined, unriddled?

What if you really were to give yourself the gift, as best you can, of stepping out into the unknown....and setting out on your own journey of discovery?

AWARENESS

Like the ripples on the water's surface formed by a falling pebble or droplet of water, so too do our action create ripples that spread out across the landscape.

Mindfulness hold us in awareness so we can see and know the quality of the ripples.

The awareness is a reminder that helps us adjust.

REVERENCE

"Man is his own most vexing problem." ~ Reinhold Niebuhr

 I think about this often, in a variety of contexts.

 I've landed here at this time in my life.....

 Most of the vexing problems I do believe are the result of us falling out of touch with the most appropriate way we humans should dwell on this earth. And what might that be?

 With reverence.

 But we don't because we get caught up in the competitive game of acquisition and achievement and comparison. We were duped into thinking that is how we progress as humans. I think it malforms us and that causes an amnesia to settle in on us in regards to what it really means to be human...and what being here could really be like.

RETRIEVING THE BITS OF OURSELVES WE LOST

There is nothing more important than finding our way back to something meaningful and that makes a real substantive difference in our own lives and the lives of others.

ALONE BUT NOT ALONE

At the most intimate level, God really is that wilderness where we all are alone. No one sees the way you see. No one feels what you feel. No one hears the whisper of the Divine in the way you do. No one else hears what the Divine is speaking specifically to you, so why is it that we allow others to interpret it for us?

Others can help, but it is important that we know the difference. No one can look after your inner life for you. Only you can do that.

Today was one of those day where I felt very alone. Not in a bad way. Just in a way. I suspect that no one would have understood and many would have had all kinds of corrective advice for me and my thoughts and my feelings. Maybe that is exactly why the space today was the way it was. The closest anyone came to that space with me today was Julie. But even she didn't understand....even though I really think there was some familiarity in what we were feeling, even if impossible for either of us to put mere words to it that could explain it sufficiently.

LUMINOUS MOMENTS

You only have a short window of time, sometimes just a brief moment, when intentionally trying to catch these plants at that one moment when the sun wiggles through plants in the distance as they move with the wind and lands on the subject, and it needs to be perfectly motionless.

HERE ALL ALONG

The inward and outward calm that is a fruit of mindfulness, is a presence, a way of being, won by way of acceptance. It's not a thing you can imagine. How can it be that it is in the letting go of the human activity of grabbing for all we desire, that it is then the very things we are in need of begin to arrive at our feet? And in actuality, nothing new has arrived. It was here all along. We were just distracted by things beyond the moment so much so that we couldn't see it or feel it.