Archive | Musings

Here are some aphorisms about kindness. They are copy righted and now in a book about kindness published by Bayard. The book is called Great Love in Little Ways and is available beginning in September 2019 Phrases posted on Facebook, June 2018 When we wrap ourselves in kindness others are warmed as well. In the […]

All of us have to accept a lot in life and it is often a struggle. To accept, we know, is not necessarily to like or to agree with. To accept, in my book, has at its core a willingness to be open to the truth whether we like what it is or not. Truly […]

We would not know warm without cold nor hunger without satiety. We live in contrasts and it is in them that we can take up conscious response ability. What do we neglect and ignore and are cold about? What do we love and hold dear and warm with attention? This is worth daily study. Phrases […]

Resting is something many of us have difficulty with and yet it is so essential. Our lives and bodies get very messed up when we don’t do enough it. There is resting with a book, resting while listening to music or resting by looking at a movie. But rest that is simple rest without anything […]

Repairing and restoring are very different to my mind. Repair seems to be more about function. Something is broken and needs fixing for it to work again. Restoring is more thoughtful. It is bringing something back to itself, to its original essence. We need both restoring and repairing, and we need the discernment to know […]

We humans mark time, divide it into years, months, weeks, days and hours. But time, in a greater sense, can be thought of as a creative, seamless evolving. We might ask a beginning-of-the-year question with that perspective in mind. What am I at this time asked to bring into being? The first answer that intuitively […]

We participate in two time dimensions when we receive a blessing or give one. Of course we can see that a blessing occurs in the now at a significant moment in time. What we don’t see as easily is that a blessing continues its action in timeless time. To become aware of this even just […]

The word, hospital, is in the word hospitality. Considerations of the heart are really acts of hospitality that we can inhabit and grow to understand to be about inclusiveness and repair. To open our inner doors to sharing and mending, what better use can we make of our lives? Neither fame, financial fortune, nor favor […]

The year comes around again to the winter solstice and the many ways we humans have commemorated this time of year. The need to mark time, to be more present than usual, to imbue time with meaning is ancient in us. What we do these days and what was done long ago are very different. But under it all, our little planet is spinning in a vast universe and we mark time, making some days more significant to us than others.

I think we might find that by the time we are septuagenarians we will have spent an accumulated four to five of our years waiting or more. That thought staggered me, and so when I wait now (and I am a septuagenarian) I say to myself, you are alive now. Watch. Breathe deeply. This is prime time.