Truth

The Mystery within...

I haven’t gotten outside much this winter and the truth is I am really longing for the emotional strength and spiritual comfort past winter walks brought me.  I long for deep feathery snow that kicked up lightly or a sandpaper crunch beneath my feet, or being gently blessed by fine falling crystals from a high cedar bough.  I think its time for me to reread “God Never Hurries” for my main purpose in writing it was to always remember my heightened awareness from the everyday messages that came with each season, and everything in it.

In the section of my memoir titled Truth, the first two paragraphs read:

Light snow was falling on an early January morning when I drove my car to a neighborhood service station and left it there for an oil change.  The snow stopped as I started to walk home.  Several hours later when I went back to pick up my car, I was surprised to see my footprints still alone in the fresh snow.  No one else had walked my path.  I backtracked on my lone footprints thinking of the path I had trod the previous year and my painstaking search for truth in daily reflection and writing.

Several blocks later, I saw a woman approaching.  She walked in my original prints but didn’t know me.  We smiled as we passed each other and said hello.  I wondered:  if she reflected and wrote each day about her reality, what would her truths be?  When I reached the corner, I crossed to the other side of the street so I could continue in my tracks.  There a man’s footprints had tracked on mine.  I wondered what his truths were and could he understand my reality? 

I am currently going for physical therapy for my sore knee so I can hopefully return to a life lived closer to God’s creation were weather, skies, sun, clouds, rain, ice, wind, birds, fog, water, waves, stones, leaves, and animals and fish and so much more spoke to me in every season and let me know that I am loved.  While at physical therapy today an overhead television screen showed bedridden soldiers with horrific incapacitating injuries.  I hope they know that they are loved.

What if each and everyone one of us, everywhere, knew that we are loved?  Would there be need for injury anywhere?  

Searching

The Mystery within...

What I write about is not so much the things I know, but is more about searching for what I can learn from my week.  It keeps me alert and noticing more carefully the people, places and things in my life.  It also keeps me wondering about the Divine Mystery within each one of us and all Creation.   

This past week I’ve been drawn to what we all have in common, which paradoxically is our differences.  My three-month-old Yellow Lab, Oliver, put me on this train of thought with his uniquely own personality.  The breeder who brought us Oliver knew her puppies and wanted what was best for them.  When I told her I hoped our dog would eventually become a Paw Pal volunteer, and accompany me on Hospice visits, she called the family who had already previously selected him, but had not yet taken him in.  She knew the other prospective family had agility training plans and suggested we switch these last remaining puppies from a litter of nine.  When we went to get Oliver he was the puppy content with being held while his brother trotted along the fence line until he found a spot where he could sneak under.  Oliver, however, presents his own challenges like resisting his leash, and lying down on the sidewalk with a devilish look in his eyes that says, “Carry me.”  At a little over 24 pounds now, that is not happening.  And so Oliver is proving that on the flip side of our unique strength, also lays our weakness.

For the past few weeks Richard Rohr’s daily meditations have been offering a brief general overview of the Enneagram as a transformational tool with its nine different energy types (“the reading of souls”).  Knowing our respective gifts, and corresponding shadow, helps us acknowledge and then address our individual darkness.  And it has me thinking, what if we all embraced the fact that what we all have in common is our differences?  For starters, wouldn't it make life a whole lot easier for us and everyone else?