All I am certain of right now is that the contemplative way continues to be a powerful resistance and antidote to a world that demands our relentless doing and exhaustion. Our choices for slowness where and when we can point to a different way of being, to another world that exists just below the surface of this one. 

~Christine Valters Paintner

sample the etiquette of beingness….

inquiry for today~ can you live in the midst of so much uncertainty?

mirroring the goodness

Does how we live validate or invalidate what we know? At our best, we’re carriers of wisdom, sometimes able to grow what we carry and sometimes burdened by it. This opens another question. How do we get strength from what we know? For sometimes the torch that lights our way, if held too close, can blind and burn us.

What if the work we avoid but can’t escape is not to go anywhere- not forward or to greater heights- but to devote ourselves to bringing who we are and what we do closer together? What if the hardest, most necessary task is to have all that we know enliven our care, until we pour the dream like a salve of honey into every flaw and break we find?

~Mark Nepo