photo: Big Red

 

Spirituality: Kim Ridley in "Ode," Vol. 3, October 2005

We can make a difference when we draw on our courage and creativity to stand up for our beliefs. Our small actions carry a cumulative power that can shift the planet onto a more positive course. We only need to tap our innate creativity and connect with expression not only through a particular medium like paint or clay or words; the other medium we all have to express our creativity is our lives.

As human beings, we're innately creative, capable of great love, and creatures of community. When we draw on our natural gifts and act together, we have enormous power to ease suffering and invent new possibilities for a better world.

Photo: New England's Autumn

 

Spirituality; Kurt Vonnegut in More Letters of Note

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives...

Here’s an assignment for tonight...Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed...But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing...

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash receptacles. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

Photo: A Llama

 

Spirituality: Louis Savary, The Christian Phenmenon, the Once and Future Church, p. 68

Look at parents who love their child unconditionally. They do not control the child's every movement. They manage and guide the child's words and behaviors.

What else can loving parents do besides control? Every good parent and every good boss at work could give you a list of ways that love intervenes in and guides the lives of those they love without controlling them.

 

First of all, while parents and bosses cannot control the ones they love, they can manage them. Managing is very different from controlling. Managing one's children or managing a team of workers is quite different from controlling them.

 

Here is a short list of ways you can manage without controlling. You can supervise, encourage, affirm, advise, suggest, protect, guide, teach, govern, moderate, intervene, educate, inspire, bless, introduce, model, demonstrate, console, forgive, prepare situations, connect them with certain others, set limits, and so on and so forth.

Poem: “In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees 

are turning 

their own bodies 

into pillars 

of light, 

are giving off the rich 

fragrance of cinnamon 

and fulfillment, 

the long tapers 

of cattails 

are bursting and floating away over 

the blue shoulders 

of the ponds, 

and every pond, 

no matter what its 

name is, is 

nameless now. 

Every year 

everything 

I have ever learned 

in my lifetime 

leads back to this: the fires 

and the black river of loss 

whose other side 

is salvation, 

whose meaning 

none of us will ever know. 

To live in this world 

you must be able 

to do three things: 

to love what is mortal; 

to hold it 

against your bones knowing 

your own life depends on it; 

and when the time comes to let it 

go, 

                                           to let it go. 

Spirituality: Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

Photo: Sun and Orange

 

Prayer: from Simply Prayer by Wendy Mary Beckett

Simple prayer is above all a response to God -- a response, not an initiative. Prayer is concerned not so much with me as with God. We are invited to surrender to God even when our instincts rebel. The essential act of prayer is to stand unprotected, vulnerable, before God. That God should take possession of us is the purpose of life. We know that we belong to God; we know, too, if we are honest, that almost despite ourselves, we keep a tight grip on our own autonomy. To truly belong to God means having nothing left for ourselves, to be bound to the will of Another. If you desire to stand surrendered before God, then you are standing there; it needs absolutely nothing else. Whether you are aware of God's presence or not does not matter. Know that God is in you and with you -- now and forever.