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 of any kind holds a candle to the warmth of a hospitable heart. To work with considerations of the heart is to work with humility and grace.
Phrases posted on Facebook January 2017
I like to think of “considerations of the heart” as ways to wonder. In Simple Ways I wrote the following: “What does it mean to wonder? It means to fully experience without mental conclusions. To wonder is open-ended and full of attention. It allows for fresh nuances, even when we seem to experience the same thing many times.” Here’s the consideration: Today could I look at just one thing in freedom–without grasping, judging or denying it?
“To wonder is to be alive with curiosity and spaciousness and with such courtesy toward the given that it has the chance to become a gift to us.” Consideration of the heart: Today can I perceive that everything around me is part of God’s glory. Can I learn not to diminish anything?
For many of us in the North East we are housebound today as the snow comes rocketing down. It’s time for a little wondering. Here’s a consideration for the heart from Simple Ways: What knocks at my inner door? What welcome guest or unknown fear is asking to be given sanctuary this day?
“We can close our eyes, but we cannot close our ears. Without ear-lids we are in a sense always open to the world.” Here is a consideration for the heart from Simple Ways: Today, could I try to hear below the surface of my conversations? Could I welcome the ache and beauty of life wanting to speak and to be heard?
“Who we are is impossible to define. We can only let go into a larger keeping.” Consideration for the Heart: Under the cover of night could I know that light shines from distant stars and from a Love that holds both them and me in every moment?
“There is in the word, dwell, a sense of time. When we really inhabit our homes we gain a sense of time, and we are then more able to know where we are, whom we are, and how we might grow.” Consideration: Today, could I be grateful for the sweet shelter my home gives to me?
“It is a great challenge to look upon the world and be so disposed as to try to see it for itself, without the way our judgments divide it.” Consideration: Today, could I ask my eyes to be the eyes of friendliness whenever I meet a stranger or encounter something I do not understand?
“With every inhalation we are given life. With every exhalation we must surrender that life, for another breath to be given to us. If we could fully enter the rhythm of this paradox we would live with immediacy, and be intimate with birth and death and life itself Consideration: Can just this next breath be one I receive instead of take?
“How we walk this life is our own journey. But what we come to be is the gift we are to share with others.” Consideration: Today could I ask if the direction I am walking in my life is my choice, or merely habit?
“To truly touch another we must relate from that inner place that never insists or resists, but only is. First we must bear that mystery ourselves.
We must let it open us, the way a great field invites us when the gate stands ajar and we step out on ground whose furthest dimensions are and remain always unknown.” Consideration: At least once today could I touch without a purpose or a need?
“We are often not aware how full of expectations our relationships are–that we “should” be considered, understood, and done right by. Unstated rules, for the conduct of another, or our selves, lie like land mines on the path of our connections.” Consideration: The conditioned sense of one’s rights, or lack of rights, ignores the holy sanctity that is at the core of each person.
‘Up and down goes the way. It cannot be otherwise. Coming and going we are always in process between levels of feeling and experience, between time and timelessness. And yet we can only take one step at a time.” Consideration: This day, could I not live ahead of myself but be willing to take one step at a time?
“When we wait, pen in hand, before a blank page of a journal we are asking our minds to also be blank. We are asking our hand to write down not so much what concerns us, but rather those intimations we sense from the still, small voice. Consideration: Am I aware that I am writing a letter to my soul?
“It is not accident that the word heart is in the word hearth. If we reflect for a moment about the heart of our home, we will have a sense of it straight away.” Consideration: Could we daily be aware that much like wood is brought to a fire, we must bring ourselves to our homes for them to be vibrant and alive?
