You do not convince people with arguments, strategies or tactics.
You convince them by learning how to welcome them.
For that, it is necessary to keep doors open, above all the doors to the heart.
Pope Francis
In the heart
Tag: Be fully present
Where
God comes to you disguised as your life.
Paula D’Arcy, American Writer, retreat leader and seminar speaker
The smallest bit of beauty
Nature teaches us that the moment when darkness is greatest is also the moment that light is about to return.
[In Iran] On the winter solstice families gather for a feast and surround themselves with candles, eat pomegranates and nuts, and recite poetry. “It is a beautiful way of assuring you that you have lived through long nights before. It is precisely at the point that the night is longest and darkest that you’ve actually turned a corner.”
Medieval Persian writings suggested that if one could not afford a feast, it is enough to bring a flower, “Look for the smallest bit of beauty around you. That very much resonates today, at a time where it seems like the mega-systems are all broken or falling apart, to return your gaze to the small.”
Omid Safi, professor of Iranian studies at Duke University, describing the 2,500 year old Iranian winter tradition of Yalda in the New York Times
Make a poem
Some words for these, the darkest days of the year: Silence, praise and inner life.
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come out of the silence,
like prayers prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb the silence
from which it came.
Wendell Berry, How to Be a Poet
Freedom
From the 17th to the 23rd of December a special sequence of invocations have been prayed, since at least the 5th Century. The one for today remembers the Israelites journey out of slavery in Egypt:
O Adonai, You appeared to Moses in the burning bush,
and gave him the Law on Sinai:
come and save us with an outstretched arm.
The word in Hebrew – Mitzraim – means “a narrow place”, so “going out from Egypt” can mean going from a place where we are stuck, to a wider place, a place where we are free. Many of us have felt stuck this year, so this ancient desire at this time, the darkest days of the year, reflects a deep longing to be freed, to see where we are trapped and to let go of what is dead in our lives.
You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
David Whyte, Sweet Darkness
Every step
Courage is like – it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: You get it by courageous acts.
It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.
Mary Daly
Mindfulbalance 