seeds
Musings: Revival of the Muse
Slowly she is resurfacing, the Muse that feeds my imagination and nudges the words out of my mind and onto the page. I know the change in weather has something to do with it. For about a week now the days have been warm and full of sunshine, just the right environment to entice me out into my beloved garden to work the soil, scatter seeds, and plant some flowers.
Nature has also responded with much burgeoning growth. Trees are budding out at the speed of light and the St. Augustine grass has gone from hay-colored to fresh spring green in the flash of an eye. Tiny green shoots are poking through the earth, a promise of beauty and color yet to come.
Another deciding factor has been the time change. We sprang forward last weekend and the evenings are lighter longer which always brightens my soul. And even though this afternoon the sunshine slowly disappeared and the sky became leaden grey, I was able to feel very grateful and even lighthearted when the rains came to soak the parched ground.
We have had a very mild winter and we really need some rain. I am especially grateful that it has rained today because this means that I do not have to expend time and energy to water the garden tomorrow. We do not have an automatic system and it is quite time and energy consuming to move the sprinklers all around the garden to their allotted spots to make sure everything gets a good soaking.
So here I sit, in my wonderful lanai, outside yet sheltered from the rain, allowing the thoughts to flow and the fingers to run across the keyboard. The sky is still mostly grey and I think we will probably get some more rain this evening. Everything is a fresh lush green and, even though it is already 7.15pm, it is still quite light. I love moving through spring into longer days. For whatever reason it makes me feel more alive.
I think the change in weather and the change in time have happened just perfectly for me right now because both of these events have helped me to move outside and beyond the prevailing sadness that surrounded me and weighed down my heart. This was due to five deaths that have happened among my friends and family since the end of October last year. Dealing with death, even as I accept it as part of life’s cycle, takes its toll in a physical and emotional way. I am just so grateful that I have strong support systems and the right tools to help me deal with it.
Just as nature cycles through her seasons, so too do we humans. And to appreciate and enjoy the new life we also need to accept and appreciate the dying to the old life. I am grateful to have a faith, a belief in God and in a life hereafter. So once I move past the sorrow of loss I can rejoice and celebrate at the soul’s onward journey. Who knows what joys and what adventures await us in the Big Beyond!!
Shared Wisdom: A Rush of Words
I just love it when I come upon a wealth of wise sayings and quotations. In the last seven days I have received a rush of wise words. They have come from many disparate places: a car bumper sticker, a friend’s home, a special workshop given by a dynamic speaker – Fr. Larry Richards from Pennsylvania, and, because of a piece of research work that I did, from the internet. I have collected so many of them that I will spread them over a few postings. Here is the first batch.
“God does not love us if we change; God loves us so that we can change.” (Fr. Richard Rohr)
“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
“No man is rich enough that he can buy back his past.” (Oscar Wilde)
“When the spiritual, mental, and emotional bodies are healthy, the physical body manifests health and becomes more vibrant, too. Our smiles, our eyes, our posture, and even our skin, which is the largest organ in the body and most sensitive to energy, send off a positive, attractive energy. This is part of the realignment process and will naturally affect your relationships, too.” (Sierra Bender)
“Your love for God is only as great as the love you have for the person you love the least.” (Dorothy Day)
“Clouds come into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.” (Rabindranath Tagore)
“They came to sit and dangle their feet off the edge of the world and after a while they forgot everything but the good and true things they would do some day.”
(Brian Andreas)
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” (Maya Angelou)
“The fact that I can plant a seed and it becomes a flower, share a bit of knowledge and it becomes another’s, smile at someone and receive a smile in return, are to me continual spiritual exercises.” (Leo Buscaglia)
“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.” (Seneca)
And the last one for today is, in my opinion, superb:
“Show up. Tell the truth. Be very alert. Expect nothing.” (A car bumper sticker)
And just think, there are more to follow
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Waiting For God
I have to write about this because it just seems to keep coming up in one way or another in my daily readings. Patience is a virtue that I have had to work hard on acquiring. Left to my own devices I’m a “I want what I want, when I want it” type of gal. (Partners well with that “fly by the seat of my pants” personality that I have!) I love immediate results – yesterday!!
So when I opened my copy of the Daily Word yesterday and saw the topic was “patience” a small inner part of me groaned. That seems to be my first response to anything that smacks of a personal lesson that I need to learn, or relearn, or reinforce! Fortunately that response is usually short-lived and I am willing to dive in and look at the lesson. I am grateful today that I am willing to be teachable.
The title immediately under the topic read: “I patiently await answered prayer.” And I recognized instantly that I needed to go back in my other meditation books because I knew that I had received this message several times over the last couple of weeks. Someone was definitely trying to get my attention!!
In the posting that I wrote yesterday, Return To My Spiritual Sanctuary, I quoted from the book The Power of Prayer by E.M. Bounds, (July 8). Over a period of three or four days in the same book I found the following messages: “Persistent prayer has patience to wait and strength to continue.” (July 4) And, “Even if God does not answer our prayers right away, we must keep on praying.” (July 6)
Imagine my dismay when I turned the page on July 10 and found the title, “Delays and Denials” and read, “We need to give thought to the mysterious fact of prayer – the certainty that there will be delays and denials. We must prepare for and permit these delays and denials.” So does this mean that I have to wait for God to answer my prayer in His time? He’s not going to respond to my requests immediately? I am going to have to wait!!
I returned to yet another of my daily books, Moments of Peace in the Presence of God published by Bethany House, where I remembered a title from about ten days ago. And there it was: “Waiting For God’s Timing”. I took the time to reread this and I would like to share some of it with you.
“ ‘Truly my soul silently waits for God; From Him comes my salvation.’ Psalm 62:1
No amount of worrying can make things happen, let alone make them happen the way you want. Still, your human nature, bent on trying, rises to the challenge. What’s the remedy for this all-too-common malady? Oswald Chambers in his classic My Utmost For His Highest, wrote, ‘When God brings a time of waiting, and appears to be unresponsive, don’t fill it with busyness, just wait ….. If you have the slightest doubt, then he is not guiding.’
The story of Abraham and Sarah illustrates the futility of trying to make a divine promise come about in your own timing. Tired of waiting for a son, Sarah took matters into her own hands. The result was disastrous. God’s timetable always delivers an Isaac when the time is right.”
This reflection finished with the following prayer:
Slow me down, God, when I am in a hurry and you are not.
Help me to walk with you, not ahead of you.
Teach me to plant the seed and leave the harvest to you.
Amen
What a concept. I need to make this prayer part of my daily prayers. I need to remember to walk with God and not try to walk ahead of Him. Imagine that, trying to guide God! Only someone with the underlying egotistical traits of character that I have would attempt to do that. So for the foreseeable future my lesson needs to be one of patience laced with generous dollops of humility.