When you forget or repress the truth and depth of your invisible belonging and decide to belong to some system, person, or project, you short-circuit your longing and squander your identity. To have true integrity, poise, and courage is to be attuned to the silent and invisible nature within you. Real maturity is the integrity of inhabiting that “immortal longing” that always calls you to new horizons. Your true longing is to belong to the eternal that echoes continually in everything that happens to you. Real power has nothing to do with force, control, status, or money. Real power is the persistent courage to be at ease with the unsolved and the unfinished. To be able to recognize, in the scattered graffiti of your desires, the signature of the eternal.

~John O’Donohue

and oh how I long for open joy…..

inquiry for today~ may your comfort in this day arise from a sense of capacity to life yourself up…..

When I die
plant a pinwheel
in an open field
where winter’s wind
and rain march forcefully
across in battalions,
and you can stumble
out there to meet me
one late afternoon
when you feel the world
must surely be ending.

You, soaked
from tears and storms,
kinship with dark sky.
Me, rainbow axis whirling,
an orbit of
joyful defiance.

You then, inspired,
tumble gleefully
across grass, pirouette,
forgetting for a moment
grief’s burden,
knowing the world
will be with you
for many years to come.

Never think
this brief sojourn wasted
as you head back
to the fire waiting at home,
laughing to yourself
the whole way.

~Christine Valters Paintner