A Cause to Pause

My recent low energy brings with it a generous amount of reflection time.  Like so many other aspects of our lives, we don't usually take the time to contemplate what is important until there seems to be an urgent need.  It's a rare gift to be forced to sit and read and think.  Definitely not a gift I would have chosen. (Who knows?  Maybe I would really like fruitcake if I had to try it.)

I pulled out a book I read about five years ago.  It is a book that helped me in many ways, titled, "I Will Not Die An Unlived Life" by Dawna Markova.  I had dog-eared so many pages.  You might want to skip this blog until you have a few minutes to absorb it.  Dawna offers some beautiful places to launch a spirit into new perspectives.

"If you move very fast and stay very busy and live in a very noisy way, never relating to inertia or the truth stillness can bring, you may never hear your hungers . . . . Just as you can hear your stomach grumbling when your body is hungry, so, when the shell gets too thick, if you listen really deeply in the silence, you will hear your soul keening," she writes.

And I offer you a few of the other quotes that I love.  They are meant to address our futures and what values are most important to us.

"What (people, places, events, situations) deplete your energy?  What generates energy for you?"

"May we all find something to love that is larger and more powerful than anything we fear."

" . . . the art of success is using what you're good at to overcome the challenges that life brings you."

"To be fully alive, we have no choice but to finally move closer toward what we usually veer away from."

"You can't grab God.  You just have to become empty.  Then God will have a space to enter."

And finally, particularly profound for me right now,

"What if the moments of the greatest wounding in your life were also places where the Divine crossed your path and the unquenchable dream of your life was born?  God has an exquisite sense of humor.  Wouldn't it be a good joke if the worst that has happened to us holds the possibility of bringing the best in us to the community?"