Living,
Inside of Now
Some years ago, my daughter and I were strolling through a yellow field of summer flowers in PEI. We were discussing the word “meaning”. During our walk, she suggested I write when meaning moves me to experience a more beautiful world.
Decades ago, Joseph Settler, a renowned theologian, asked at a conference, “Would anyone like another name for God?” I instantly raised my hand, as did others. He held his silence, then stated, “Meaning is another name for God.” Instantly, I knew he was right, that one little word changed my theology. Meaning is everywhere, found in everything, and constantly enlarges my life.
Thus, I began a blog of writings, bimonthly for ten years, which, at the time, I called…
Life, Meaning, and Joyful Purpose: Tips and Triggers
Its introduction read, “These are the questions these writings explore: What is the How to for living well? What sparks our spirituality? What triggers Joyful Purpose?, and What trips us up?”
I was discovering, my new awareness offered love, and wisdom, and created an expanding depth of appreciation in my life. I also found meaning, spirit, and purpose can come oddly clothed in grief, loss, unwanted, change, and in the smallest, most seemingly, ordinary moment.
From that collection of writings, the book titled, Moments That Blink Back was published and can be ordered from Amazon, Friesen Press, or from Indigo. Some of the writings in the book include:
watering…
“The geranium just died on the window sill but teacher you went right on talking.” ~Albert Cullum
“Isn’t it lovely.”
The Saguaro and the Kachina Isn’t It Lovely My art student, hunched over her walker, seemed to have melted to mere skin, bones, and dents. She informed me she is too weak now to come to class. I am saddened.
the crossroad…
One operates at a peculiar crossroadwhere time and place and eternity somehow meet.The problem is to find that location. ~Flannery O’Connor, a
Oh you rascal day, what music will you play?
Hello Day, you little rascal. What have you in mind for this small box called me? Will I feel your early freshness like an inner morning skin? Will I pause to see your skies and hear your laughter in the
An invitation is out…
Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial. That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality — your soul, if you will — is as
Grandma visits the “Pure Land.”
“Yesterday during walking meditation I saw two little violet flowers in the grass. They were so beautiful, tiny, very well manifested, and I picked one and I picked the other, and I offered them to two venerable monks who had
“I don’t care” has an honored place…
“let all go — the small middling tall bigger really the biggest and all things — let all go so comes love”
Which are the artificial yeses?
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight…
Maybe our abundance…
What gift can we hope to bring to dying?Maybe our abundance…? Her daughter’s voice is stressed as she tells me on the voice mail the chemo is no longer working. The doctor gives her mother, my cousin, two weeks to