Dear Friends,
We hope that you are safe and well.
Today's Meditation is a reflection by Carrie Newcomer: "In Praise of the Lull"--may you be blessed with many lulls and make room for many lulls in your life.
We invite you to join us as we commit ourselves to working tirelessly to end systemic and structural racism in our society, in the church, in healthcare, in the workplace--wherever it shows up so that everyone may come to have more abundant life. May this meditation nourish our contemplative-active hearts and sustain all of us in action.
In the spirit of our philosophy of co-creating community and our awareness that the Spirit speaks through each of us, we invite you to share your meditations with us as well. We truly believe that it is God's economy of abundance: when we share our blessings, our thoughts, our feelings, we are all made richer.
We hope and pray that you find peace, healing, hope and the infusion of joy in your life!
With our love and care,
Ron and Jean
MEDITATION 801: Carrie Newcomer:
In Praise of The Lull
Carrie Newcomer
Oct 10
FOR BELONGING
May you listen to your longing to be free.
May the frames of your belonging be generous enough for your dreams.
May you arise each day with a voice of blessing whispering in your heart.
May you find a harmony between your soul and your life.
May the sanctuary of your soul never become haunted.
May you know the eternal longing that lives at the heart of time.
May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within.
May you never place walls between the light and yourself.
May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world to gather you, mind you, and embrace you in belonging.
From Bless the Space Between Us by John O'Donohue
Walking home through the woods near my home…
We live in an era of bewilderingly fast communication and connection, circles of interaction that are more often wider than deep. With the arrival of the smart phone knowledge is literally at the tips of our fingers, and this immediate access can lull me into a feeling of expansion - but without true expansiveness. Don’t get me wrong, I love learning and I love my Merlin app, which has helped me recognize and learn bird songs all summer. But all that knowledge at my fingertips has a shadow side. I find myself wanting to immediately consult Google instead of just being with a question for awhile. I know as an artist, really interesting things happen when I can just ponder and suppose, take in and mull the question. I can feel the devise calling me to leave the larger room of the life I’m living and enter into the smaller room that resides inside the device, to trade the possibilities of uncertainty for the safety of sureness. But, I know the reason why I want to become more familiar with bird calls is because when I become more familiar with a song, I hear it more often and with greater appreciation. For me, being able to name the song is like putting on eye-glasses that sharpen an image, and what was once a wash of warbles and tweets has become an astonishing collection of individual songs.
I remember sitting alone in a sidewalk cafe on a crisp autumn day. The sunlight was sparkling on the yellow leaves of a maple tree. The coffee cup was warm, the brew was strong and I’d taken out my notebook to write. Four beautifully bearded and tattooed young people were sitting at the next table. There was a lull in the conversation and everyone had gotten on their smart phones, checking texts and the weather, social media or the latest up to the second news. The image was common, people sitting side by side on a bus, airport gate, waiting room or cafe, all giving up the wide view of their individual attention to the small view of the device in their hands. It felt like a missed opportunity.
A lull in the conversation is a moment to breathe, take in the autumn air, create the kind of connection that can only happen in quiet moments when nothing much (and yet everything) is happening. A lull is a time when something might spark a new idea or line of conversation. A lull is a open space that invites us into possibility, deeper connection, taking notice and just “being.”
We’ve become so used to information that comes rapid-fire and having our mental space so full its like any given moment of our lives have three news scrolls crawling along the bottom edge. A lull has started to feel unfamiliar, even uncomfortable in a culture that presses us to hurry-up-and-get-there- before…before…before what? Before the walls of the golden city are built? Before the polar bears are lost? Before the next thing we were suppose to do is already over?
I remember a book I read as a small child. It was a story of an old man who complained and complained to his wife that their house was too small. The wife was wise and loved the old man and so she came up with a plan. Each day she would devise some reason why some of the animals on their little farm needed to live inside the house. First she brought in three cat and two dogs and the old man grumbled. Then the next day she brought in five chickens and six ducks and the old man grumbled louder. Then the woman brought in a wooly ewe sheep, her twin sleepy lambs and three goats. The old man grumbled even more, loudly bemoaning the size of their terribly small house. Finally, on the last day, the woman added the milk cow to the full and overflowing family space. The little old man was beside himself, trying not to step on ducks and chickens, sitting on the lambs or bumping into the goats and cow. He yelled in great despair that they must have the smallest house in all the world. Then the wise old woman said, “Ah, the work on the chicken coop and barn was finished and the fence had been mended. The animals can go back outside.” She led the animals back to the barn and the coop, released them to the yard and the pasture. When she came back to the house the old man was sitting at the kitchen table, looking around in wonder, amazed at the glorious spaciousness of their home.
He had found the lull in the conversation, the space between the words, the moment with no news crawl, the home he didn’t realize was already there, just beneath all the squawking, barking and bleating.
Practice: Sit outside or in a comfy chair. Take a few deep breaths. Notice what you hear, see, smell, feel. Don’t open your phone when the urge to check it comes up. after a few minutes like this, write on line describing what you noticed.
example from me - “Fir trim around the windows, leaves tinged golden at the edges outside, a newly bathed dog snoring on the forest colored rug, the dusty smell of the last autumn flowers in a celadon green and womanly rounded vase.”
Yup my dog Ella bear and emergency back up dog Lily Junebug