Today, we are not made slaves to time. We recognize that Love has its own rhythms, and although we work steadily and in the spirit of humble service, we give up our worried opinions about what tasks must be accomplished by what time and instead yield to Love's wise timing. Love also wants for us periods of rest, renewal, restoration, and recovery. Include and honor that in your day.
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Today, spend less time fretting about other people's worries, character flaws, and decisions, and more taking care of the business of your own life, attending to whatever it is that could benefit from a little attention. Sometimes we are called to do good for another; sometimes, we use worries and judgements about others to distract us from ourselves.
Love gives you the gift of authority. Today, you are given authority over self-doubt, fears, repetitive or obsessive thinking, and a feeling of being controlled by circumstances or others. Accept this gift. This divinely-given authority bestows on you confidence, courage, patience, steadiness, clarity in your thinking, and trust.
From David Whyte's book The Three Marriages:
"Eventually we realize that not knowing what to do is just as real and useful as knowing what to do. Not knowing stops us from taking false directions. Not knowing what to do, we start to pay real attention." Today, don't be afraid of not knowing. Don't be impatient with not knowing. Let not knowing keep you humble, awake, listening, seeing in new ways. Love does not always need our words or actions to do its work. Like the soap in which we soak our clothes or the yeast which makes the bread rise, Love often needs most time and space to do its work, without our busy interference, fears, bustling, and many words. Today, do and speak less, and trust more.
A 104-year-old Qigong teacher says, "Be thoroughly confused every day."
Today, know that confusion is an important stage in gaining new skills, growing in wisdom, seeing from new perspectives, shedding misunderstandings, and cultivating humility and compassion. Be patient with yourself in your confusion, as you would with a small child learning a new skill or concept. In the Bible, Peter and John restore the lame man at the temple to soundness.
Today, Love restores each of us to soundness. To be sound means to be healthy and robust, competent and sensible, substantial and enduring, untroubled, free from damage or defect, in good condition. Today, let Love establish and defend each of these qualities in us. Feel the power of Love establishing soundness in our communities. Your spiritual self is luminous and beloved, radiant and necessary. Your human self is not as important as it imagines, in its gifts, suffering, or responsibilities.
Wayne Muller writes in Legacy of the Heart: "When I need people to see me as special, I focus primarily on my need and cannot hear the breadth and depth of who they are in that moment . . . In truth, none of us is more special than anyone else. Each of us is was given a particular combination of wounds, gifts, talents, and imperfections that merely gives texture to the quality of our experience. Our wounds and gifts do not set us apart, they are simply the human qualities that unite us . . . To learn humility is to honor that your hurt and mine are one, that my life and yours are cut from the same cloth, and the we share the gentle communion of being human." Today, commit to less so you can do what you do with more depth, more carefulness, more awareness of the presence of Love. Take time to see others as Love sees them.
Today, know that you are welcomed, that you belong, that Love itself delights in you.
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AuthorTarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm and numerous essays. You may read more of her work at tarnwilson.com. Archives
September 2020
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