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Let The Grace You Need Come

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“Grace slips in among the details of daily life, in all the noise and press and chaos of it, and asks us to take notice. Manifesting through words, through art, through all manner of creative expression that ultimately flows from the heart of God, grace gives us the tools and the ability to respond not only to what we find beautiful but also to work with the stuff of life that is awful, that is painful, that makes no sense. Grace does not make life make sense, but it can ground us in the midst of it, giving us a place to stand — or dance, or paint, or sing.” – Jan Richardson The phone doesn’t ring. A neighbor drops by. The email goes unanswered. A gift arrives. The contract’s cancelled. An opening occurs. The plan fails. An opportunity arises. The old friend moves on. A new friendship deepens. The story loses its meaning. A new story gets told. That’s how it works. Whether we realize it or not, grace comes, but it comes dressed up in …

Take Yourself Playfully

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“Writing is the act of discovery.”  ― Natalie Goldberg Morning has arrived. The sun comes over the mountains. Light fills the treetops. Birds fly out of the forest, and it all starts over. This repetition, this always, this again. Still you stand there thinking “ok, so now what?” as if you didn’t know. You must get started. But how do you begin? Knowing how path leads to path, it doesn’t really matter how, only that you do. One way to begin is just like this, one word after another, until you’ve risen out of always and again to find yourself in a new place. Along the way you might find it helpful to follow some basic pilgrim practices. When you keep your eyes open, stay alert for surprise, and let go of expectations, then you’ll begin to generate the results you desire. You may have already noticed how expectations rise up as obstacles that block the way, so why not clear the path? There is no such thing as not good enough. There is only work that doesn’t get done. You’re …

Break the Cycle: Start with Joy.

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“My ideas are always changing, always moving around one center, and I am always seeing that center from somewhere else. Hence, I will always be accused of inconsistency. But I will no longer be there to hear the accusation.”  – Thomas Merton  When I was a kid, my friends and I would go to an amusement park where our favorite ride was The Wall of Death, a big wooden cylinder that spun round and round. As it spun faster, riders would be pinned to the wall and the floor would drop out.  It wasn’t magic that held us there, we knew that, and yet it felt that way. There we’d be, our feet meters above the ground, freed from gravity, free to perform whatever stunts our courage allowed. My friends wound hang upside down, climb the wall up to the edge and look out, or make their way across to the other side. My courage didn’t allow that.  I started from a place of fear. Watching other riders from above was dizzying enough. What am I doing, I’d think? …

Step Into A New Story

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“I lost almost everything,” says the man, “and now I’ve got nothing”. His friend says, “We could make something out of that”. Let me tell you a story about stories and the power they have to drive our lives. Whenever we start thinking we have nothing, we’ve stepped through a blind spot into a trap. The blind stop is real. The trap is an illusion, wrapped in a lie. But we don’t see that. Instead of freeing ourselves and moving along, we stand there dazed, wondering what happened. Then we start making up stories. “It’s my own fault,” we say. “I should have seen it coming.” Our own words make the trap real. The stories we tell strengthen the lie. This is not a parable. It happens. I once heard a friend say, “I have nothing, because I am nothing.” I was staggered by the number of illusions that remark emerged from. But it had become so embedded in the story he’d been telling himself  that it had become his truth. It took a new …

The Arrival Of Unexpected Joy

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“Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”  – Anne Lamott I sit down to write. But nothing comes. Or rather I don’t know how to begin. I look out the window. Mist rises from the mountains. A breeze moves through the trees. Then, a bird crosses the sky. Then another. Then more. Pretty soon there’s hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. Wherever they’ve been all winter, I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed them until this very moment. They’re swallows, and they’re back. All at once something swoops through my body the way the swallows dance across sky. As it swoops through, I tremble with it. Then it happens again. As unexpected on this day as the swallows’ return, joy has come back. In its absence, I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it, until now. Something goes away, and we adapt. Something leaves, and we adjust. Before too long, we come to think of this as normal. We’re fine with less, we say. We’re doing all right, we claim, and sure, we’re …

Specialize In The Impossible

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“What we need are more people who specialize in the impossible.” – Theodore Roethke  The darkness has passed. Light is coming back to the world. In the forest, the impossible transformation is happening again. New life is pushing out of the hard ground. Buds are about to burst into leaf and blossom. A few weeks ago, this seemed unlikely. Yet, there has never been any doubt that it would happen. Forces have been at work below the surface. Even when it seemed that nothing was happening, something was. Why is it so hard for us to believe that these same forces are at work within us, too? I have a friend who once came to believe he’d fallen into a hole. The harder he tried to dig himself out of it, the deeper the hole got. Eventually, he just gave up and made his home there. I have another friend who loved this man so much she’d climb down into that hole every day to sit with him. Sometimes they’d watch a film together. Sometimes they’d play cards. When …

How Quietly We Begin Again

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Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final ― Rainer Maria Rilke  Let’s say you’ve stepped into a difficult day. Maybe you’ve received news that’s not easy to process. Perhaps a shadow has crossed your consciousness:  a worry, a fear, a sadness. Or let’s say you’ve stepped into a beautiful day. You’re deep in the flow, and every joy is yours. Earlier this week, I stepped into that deep in the flow day full of joy. This morning I stepped into that shadowy day. Tomorrow, who knows what will come? It could be beauty. It could be terror. There could be light. There might be darkness. It all comes, and yet nothing ever stays for long. Twice this week those lines from Rilke have come to mind. The first time it happened, they fell into my hand. I’d opened a book to find I’d written those words on a notecard at some point in the long ago past.  They returned to me like a message from my younger self.  Later, the same words appeared on …