Photo: Summer Laziness

 

Spirituality: We are Given this Minute, by R. Shlomo Arlebach

People walk around sad because they don't know what to do with their future. You have this minute right now. What are you doing with it? ...If you are filled with joy for one minute, then you will know what to do with the next minute also. We are given this minute, not tomorrow. Sadness is very much concerned with what I don't have, and I really don't have tomorrow yet. The Truth is, I am always standing before nothingness, because I am nonexistent yet for the next minute. I'm not here yet. Time isn't there. The world isn't there. The world is here...right now!

Photo: What's Up?

 

Spirituality: The Door to Joy by Irma Lalecki

The true source of joy is love—love of God, love of beauty, love of wisdom, love of another human being, it does not matter which. It is all one love: a joyful awareness of dissolving boundaries of our ordinary narrow self, of being one with reality beyond, of being made whole.

Poem: Geneen Marie Haugen, "Winter: Geminid Shower" in the online journal, Aeon

 Awake at night

while others sleep
I watch meteors fall

in glittering array,
inscrutable patterns.
Multiple fiery tails
each minute

brush the cold black
sky, sweep the cave
of my heart.

I cannot decipher the
hieroglyph of meteors,
except one passage
repeated, descending:

In zero g, space fragments
drift, invisible to human eyes.
But mesmerized by gravity,
meteors burst through
Earth's atmosphere and blaze
a firetrail across the sky:

It takes unbearable friction
and the annihilating fall
to ignite their glory light

Spirituality: Joan Chittister

Hope is what sits by a window and waits for one more dawn, despite the fact that there is not one ounce of proof in tonight's black, black sky that it can possibly come.

Photo: Coneflowers

 

Spirituality: from Creative Energy by Thomas Berry

It is my hope that all the children, the children of the deer and the wolf, the whale and other marine forms of life; the children of the osprey and the bluebird and the butterfly; the children of the oak and the pine and the dogwood; the children all together with the human children will go into the future in oneness "as a single sacred community." ... The human is less a being on the earth or in the universe than a dimension of the earth and indeed of the universe itself. We cannot discover ourselves without first discovering the universe, the earth, and the imperatives of our own being. Each of these has a creative power and a vision far beyond any rational thought or cultural creation of which we are capable. Nor do we think of these as isolated from our own individual being or from the human community. We have no existence except within the earth and within the universe.

Photo: Come, Sit

 

Spirituality: Gwen Gordon in "EarthLight," Vol. 13, No. 3

Play is our contact with our love for life. It brings us back into our joy at being alive and shows us where our freedom is. Play moves us out of our fixed mindsets: it offers freedom from the tyranny of habit, freedom from the mundane and ordinary, from the rational and need to know and be in control. It is freedom from rigid identification with race, class, gender, and even species.