Deep listening does not mean maintaining perfect attention.
We will wander. We’ll interrupt.
We’ll become reactive.
We’ll start composing our response.
The practice is the return.
Notice what happened.
Soften around it.
Come back.
Again and again, we can re-arrive in the conversation-
and in our own lives.
~Tara Brach
when it’s time for truth telling…
inquiry for today~ what is calling you home?
Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.
No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.
~Mary Oliver
