There is a teaching that says that behind all hardening and tightening and rigidity of the heart, there’s always fear. But if you touch fear, behind fear there is a soft spot. And if you touch that soft spot, you find the vast blue sky. You find that which is ineffable, ungraspable, and unbiased, that which can support and awaken us at any time.
Pema Chodron
The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it.
Ursula K. Le Guin, 1929 – 2018, American Author
Every stage of our lives involves some new form of waiting....Waiting presents an enormous challenge. We are impatient, I-can-fix-it kinds of people . . . but not all situations can be fixed. We assume that everything in life can be made better by taking action, but sometimes it just isn’t so…Waiting is an important guest to honor in the guest house of our humanity. If we consciously allow waiting to be our teacher, we can accommodate waiting more peacefully.
Holly W. Whitcomb, The Seven Spiritual Gifts of Waiting
There are different dynamics in our lives and in every day. Action is needed at times, but rest is equally needed to still the grasping, worrying mind.
If they ask you, “What is the evidence of your Father in you?” say to them, “It is movement and repose”
The Gospel of Thomas, 114 sayings attributed to Jesus written between 60 and 140 AD, saying 50, part 3.
Today is the first Sunday of Advent, a season of waiting and patience
I live by the truth that “No” is a complete sentence.
I rest as a spiritual act.
After the year that we have had, the last day according to the Christian Calendar. Advent starts this evening. A welcome time of renewal and nourishment for our tired bones…
Poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes indeed.
Mary Oliver, Poetry Handbook
The wide streams go their way,
The pond lapses back into a glassy silence.
The cause of God in me — has it gone?
Do these bones live? Can I live with these bones?
Theodore Roethke, American poet 1908 – 1963, What Can I Tell My Bones? (extract)
