… watching for the brushstrokes of God
“Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for an unknown God.” ~ Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Where do you hold space for mystery?
“Wait with your hands open
to receive what could never come
except to what is empty
and hollow.” ~ Jan Richardson
What are your hollow spaces?
“The road seen, then not seen, the hillside hiding
then revealing the way you should take,
the road dropping away from you as if leaving you
to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,
when you thought you would fall, and the way forward
always in the end the way that you came, the way
that you followed…” ~ David Whyte
What is your road hiding and revealing?
“As with most great communicators, God knows that the point of silence and the pause between sentences is not to give the audience the chance to fill the silence with empty babbling but to help create more depth to the conversation.” ~ Renite J. Weems
How do you reach depth?
What if you bowed before every dandelion you met and wrote love letters to squirrels and pigeons who crossed your path? ~ Christine Valters Paintner
Evelyn Woodward speaks of the poet’s voice (or artist I would add) as “bringing the light of what is best in our history to bear on our struggles in the present and pointing to the unknown future with hope.”
What light from history do you bring to the hope going forward?
With the Eyes of the Heart 