Our job is to love others
without stopping to inquire
whether or not
they are worthy.
~Thomas Merton
we can live our lives as a testament to full-bodied living….
inquiry for today~ there is nothing better than waking up…..
There is a myster[ious] cycle embedded in the ebb and flow of life. For some reason. loss and lament often create fertile ground for tiny shoots of new life. This is the foundation of what it means to reimagine. Poet, author, and activist James Baldwin said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Baldwin is addressing the need for our country to confront the many shadows of our past, certainly including the deep roots of racism. But I also find myself feeling some hope in his words- a precious alchemy occurs when we finally turn with compassion toward the painful elements of our personal and communal stories rather than try to simply suppress, shame, spiritually bypass, or slap some toxic positivity on them.
When we can get to what my friend Steve Carter calls “the thing beneath the thing” we open ourselves to the possibility of creatively, lovingly, and compassionately finding a new way forward with our God-given imagination. This doesn’t mean that we forget the significance of the pain or loss, or that we won’t need to repair harm we’ve done in ourselves or others, but it does mean our relationship to the pain and loss can change.
As we work to integrate the fullness of our stories- the good, the hard, and everything in between—we will have clear eyes to see the possibilities before us.
~Aundi Kolber
Make Believe Boutique 