In desert times we need to know where to find water, which rock to strike for it to pour forth, where to dig deep, or when to wait for the rain to come.
How do you dip into the well?
Well water
Depths
In the midst of storms the lake surface gets rippled and stirred while in its depths it remains unshaken and still.
How do you find that deep grounding?
A new year
A new year lies ahead. Where will it take us? What unknown and uncharted waters lie ahead? Imagine a sign at the entrance “Peace to all who enter here.”
What are you moving toward?
There is a wave of gratefulness
“…this can change our world in immensely important ways, because if you’re grateful, you’re not fearful, and if you’re not fearful, you’re not violent. If you’re grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people, and you are respectful to everybody, and that changes this power pyramid under which we live.” ~ David Steindl-Rast
How do you ride the wave of gratefulness?
Fermentation
“I always think that that’s the secret of change — that there are huge gestations and fermentations going on in us that we are not even aware of. And then, sometimes, when we come to a threshold, crossing over, which we need to become different, that we’ll be able to be different, because secret work has been done in us, of which we’ve had no inkling.” John O’Donahue in an interview with Krista Tippett
As we stand at the threshold of the Advent season, how will you pay attention to the secret work God is doing within you?
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?
With the Eyes of the Heart 