It is the immersion in the daily that paradoxically unfolds the threshold to the Infinite, for it gives us a focal point around which to be fully present. Whether it’s washing the dog or pruning the roses or gluing a broken dish or stripping your great-grandmother’s oak dresser, the attention to what is before you can massage the Unconscious into being known. As sticks were rubbed prehistorically to start fires, the rubbing of our humanity against the daily sparks the spiritual. It is this rubbing that binds us and yet it is how we know we are here. This is easier to see if we return to our water-flower analogy. For even though the motion of the water does not submerge the lotus, the rise and fall of each wave tugs at its stem. In the same way, a human being may stay centered and yet the swell of experience will tug at the stem of his or her heart. This kind of tension is the unavoidable ache of being alive, the inevitable pull between spirit and bone. For the swell of life tugging at our stem is continual evidence of our interconnectedness with all things………Mark Nepo

this deep guttural instinct to pay attention can creep up and bring us to our knees….how much have we missed? simply sit and be in this journey of a million tears……..

Before we can surrender ourselves

we must become ourselves.

For no one can give up

what he does not possess.

….Thomas Merton

we miss this delicate hope

There is a quality of stillness so rare that the air shimmers in its presence. It’s there between our eyes. We hear it when we dare to speak the truth. It vibrates with the music of life, dances in the wind, breaks forth from the trees into a clearing just as the sun rises, and settles into silence once again. There is a quality of stillness so rare that I am bared to the very marrow of my bones before it. May I choose never to be clothed again……Danna Faulds