Sometimes you need the ocean light and colors you’ve never seen before painted through the evening sky.
Sometimes you need your God to be a simple invitation… David Whyte
What invitation do you need?
Sometimes
Pine cone
“Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness – an empathy – was necessary if the attention was to matter…. Dear pine cone, let me hold you as you open.” Mary Oliver
What are you holding?
Wood hath hope
“Wood hath hope.
When it’s cut, it grows green again,
and its boughs sprout clean again.
Wood hath hope.
Root and stock, although old and withered up,
and all sunk in earth corrupt, will revive. … Wood hath hope.”
Caryll Houselander
Where is hope sprouting for you?
The Cellist of Sarajevo
On May 27, 1992 a mortar killed 22 people waiting in front of a bakery in Sarajevo. Vedran Smailovic, the cellist of Sarajevo responded to the trauma by playing cello in public spaces for two years. When a reporter asked him, “Aren’t you crazy to be playing cello during the shelling?” Smailovic replied, “You ask me am I crazy for playing cello, why don’t you ask them if they are crazy to be shelling?”
What questions need to be turned around?
Wild things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” Wendell Berry
When are you free?
Into the storm
“Each one of us has lived through some devastation, some loneliness, some weather superstorm or spiritual superstorm, when we look at each other we must say, I understand. I understand how you feel because I have been there myself. We must support each other and empathize with each other because each of us is more alike than we are unalike” Maya Angelou
What are you facing into?
With the Eyes of the Heart 