When I looked out my bedroom window this morning I saw that all the ice that had covered the pond for the past two days had melted. My heart lifted. It’s
A Fresh New Day
and the early morning light is beautiful. If I stay in this moment all I see is beauty.
As soon as I enter the living room I lift the blinds so that the light can stream in. Though it is chilly and windy outside I bask in the light streaming through the living room windows. And in the beauty of this day.
All of this beauty reminds me of a podcast I listened to yesterday by Krista Tippett in her On Being broadcasts. Krista was speaking with Pádraig Ó Tuama and Marilyn Nelson on, Where to turn to when the world is on fire.
It was a balm to listen to their poetic wisdom so I thought I would share a few quotes from the broadcast along with some of my morning photos.
“So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars. Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies. Let us listen to the sounds of our own voices, of our own names, of our own fears. Let’s claw ourselves out from the graves we’ve dug. Let’s lick the earth from our fingers. Let us look up and out and around. The world is big and wide and wild and wonderful and wicked, and our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable, and full of meaning. Oremus. Let us pray.”— Pádraig Ó Tuama
“We need stories of belonging that move us towards each other, not from each other; ways of being human that open up the possibilities of being alive together; ways of navigating our differences that deepen our curiosity, that deepen our friendship, that deepen our capacity to disagree, that deepen the argument of being alive. This is what we need. This is what will save us. This is the work of peace. This is the work of imagination.”— Pádraig Ó Tuama
I think, in my intuition, prayer is less speaking than it is listening. And I feel that my deepest experiences of prayer have been experiences of shutting up and listening.
A friend of mine who is a minister was at a retreat once. He said, and the whole time during the retreat, they would talk, and then they would go to their rooms and pray. And he was always talking to God. And at one point during his long talks to God, he heard a voice say, “Shut up and let me love you.”
And that, for me, is what it is to be quiet enough to feel held, to feel the embrace of the divine, to realize that I am a part of something vaster than vast, and to feel that, to recognize that, to feel thankful for it, and to hope that by opening myself to that awareness, that I am allowing some of that to come through me.
— Marilyn Nelson
“Prayer can be a rhythm that helps us make sense in times of senselessness, not offering solutions but speaking to and from the mystery of humanity. Prayer is rhythm. Prayer is comfort. Prayer is disappointment. Prayer is words and shape and art around desperation and delight and disappointment and desire.”— Pádraig Ó Tuama
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