
Our purpose may be large or small, and in most cases it is multi-leveled, with important actions taking place on the interpersonal level, as well as in terms of the work we do in the world. Small acts of kindness share the stage with large acts of sacrifice, and only through accepting and honoring our divinity can we know what we are called to do and when.
Ultimately, we are all equally, exactly, completely worthy of being here in this life. Moreover, we are all essential to the unfolding plan of which we are each one small, but important, part. If we suffer from low self worth, it is because we have lost track of understanding this truth, and allowing it to guide our actions in the world. Seeing ourselves as part of something larger, as beings called to serve, is the ultimate cure for feelings of unworthiness. In the end, it’s not about evaluating ourselves as worthy or unworthy, so much as it’s about accepting that we have been called here to serve and taking the steps required to listen and respond to what our lives are asking us to do.
~Madisyn Taylor
gently and quietly, we do our work….
inquiry for today~ and then you suddenly remember why you are doing what you are doing in this day….
I have come to believe that most of us have experienced some lonely spot, some private nook, some glen or streamside scene that impressed us so deeply that even today its memory recalls the mood of a lost enchantment. At the age of eighty, my grandmother used to recall with delight a lonely tract she called Beautiful Big South Woods. There, as a girl one spring day, she had seen the whole floor of the woods, acre on acre, carpeted with the blooms of bloodroot and spring beauties and blue and pink hepaticas. She had seen the woods only once but she never forgot it.
When Henry Thoreau was five, his parents, then living in the city of Boston, took him eighteen miles into the country to a woodland scene that he, too, never forgot. It was, he said, one of the earliest scenes stamped on the tablets of his memory. During succeeding years of childhood, that woodland formed the basis of his dreams. The spot to which he had been taken was Walden Pond, near Concord. Twenty-three years later, writing in his cabin on the shores of this same pond, Thoreau noted the unfading impression that fabulous landscape had made and how, even at that early age, he had given preference to this recess — where almost sunshine and shadow were the only inhabitants that varied the scene — over the tumultuous city in which he lived.
~Edwin Way Teale
IB, thank you for this timely reminder today. At 32 years old I was led through woods full of bluebells to a river babbling over rocks. Stanley, Perthshire in Scotland. ❤
Ohhhh, all of my senses came alive reading this! Thank you. Mine is a moment on a train track bridge- walking over a deep ravine. I was 22 or so. I knew life and death in that moment, and it was all ok- just to feel the wind and see the light sparkling. It was my “lost enchantment.” I was not invincible, but I could be light as air at the same time. Melancholy is rich with knowing. Thank you for offering your bluebells:)