Don’t you carry stones

“It is the whole of nature, extending from the beginning to the end, that constitutes the one image of God Who Is.”
~ St. Gregory of Nyssa

“Spiritual opening is not a withdrawal to some imagined realm or safe cave. It is not a pulling away, but a touching of all the experience of life with wisdom and with a heart of kindness, without any separation.”
~ Jack Kornfield

“The spiritual life is about becoming more at home in your own skin.”
~ Parker Palmer

“Anything that removes what grows between your heart and the day is spiritual.”
~ Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

What helps you to settle into your own skin, to become truly Your Self in the soup of all your other selves?

What brings you back to the here, the now, the life and the very moment in front of you?

What is it that allows you to lay out your experience of today like a tapestry and touch each stitch, each embroidery, each tear and mending, with wisdom and kindness and compassion?

. . .

What if the answers to these questions, every single answer, yours and mine, was a brush stroke in the portrait of God that we create together? What if your bit of Burnt Sienna here didn’t do a thing to negate my swath of Turkish Blue there. What if they worked together to get us closer and closer to the reality that eludes us?

What if?

For The Source of the Universe, my friends, is so much more than we imagine. Call it what you will–Flow, All that Is, Love, Mystery, Truth, God–I don’t care. We’re all just building up a picture, and we’d better be ready to burn it to the ground the minute it conflicts with the reality in front of us. For The One is nothing if not the very ground of Reality.

. . .

We so easily get lost, wrapped up in the little selves we’ve made for ourselves, carried along by a current of thought that isn’t serving us. We live in the shadow of something other than reality, of idols and images that are not in line with what is real. We make God in our image, to fit into the sad little box of our making, and we rob ourselves and everyone around us of what could be.

We so easily forget that our one true job is to meet the day with grace, humility, wisdom, and kindness, even when if feels like we have none. To be a conduit for all that is good in the universe, letting it flow through from elsewhere when our inner reserves are spent.

We so easily fall into a self-made mission of fighting the flow, rather than swimming with it. Man, life’s a bitch.

“Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody.”
~ Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

“Psychological wholeness and spiritual holiness never exclude the problem from the solution. If it is wholeness, then it is always paradoxical, and holds both the dark and the light side of things.”
~ Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

As the world spins around us,
As we soar through time,
As we struggle and we flail, as we bask and rejoice,
As we take our place within the dance,
Gently,

May we–each of us–sink within, reach down deep, Fall Into.
May we surrender and listen, over and over.
May we find that every bit of the cosmos is there at the seat of our soul,
And that our soul is seated in the center of the cosmos,
That we are creating it all and being created by all,
Today.

Wholeness. Holiness. Embodied.

May we breathe in What is,
Breathe into What Is,
Just
Breathe.

Time to Love Louder.

“Give up all other worlds except the one to which you belong.”
~ David Whyte, Sweet Darkness

“Because you are the whole damned sky.”
~ Kate Bowler, The Lives We Actually Have

“Don’t you carry stones,
Don’t you carry stones,
Don’t you carry stones in your bowl of light,
In your bowl of light.”
~ Trevor Hall, Bowl of Light