May you receive great encouragement
when new frontiers beckon.
May you take time to celebrate
the quiet miracles that seek no attention.
May you experience each day
as a sacred gift
woven around the heart of wonder.
John O’Donoghue, Benedictus
photo giorgio minguzzi
True restfulness is living ordinary life with a sense of ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer. We are restful when ordinary life is enough.
Ron Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern
Do not despise your inner world. Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status.
But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals.
What is the remedy…? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings.
Martha Nussbaum., American Philosopher, Lecturer in Ethics and Law, born 1947
Belonging is related to longing. If you hyphenate belonging, it yields a lovely axiom for spiritual growth: Be – Your – Longing. Longing is a precious instinct in the soul. Where you belong should always be worthy of your dignity. You should belong first in your own interiority. If you belong there, and if you are in rhythm with yourself and connected to that deep, unique source within, then you will never be vulnerable when your outside belonging is qualified, relativized, or taken away. You will still be able to stand on your own ground, the ground of your soul, where you are not a tenant, where you are at home.
John O’Donohue, Anamchara
photo bart whelan
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