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Traveling

Traveling

With all its banal indignities,

Rewards my patience,
With sun splattering snow peaks,
Above misted valley homes,
The Alps at my feet,

When the seal is broken at the end of the journey,
The elevator opens on a new city,
The manifested promise of order and power,
Of our best foresight and engineering,

And of my hope of being freed from where I was,
Into the possibility of where I’m going,
Again, again, stepping, rolling, flying towards hope,

As if hope and its promises might, this time, be real.

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Creative Self Emergence and Rilke’s Poetry

If we are lucky enough to move beyond our basic needs for safety and belonging, we can begin the process of earning the esteem of ourselves and others.  A few lucky souls even get to move toward self actualization in Maslow’s model.

But, for many, leadership opportunities look like nurturing their own and other’s creative self emergence. Continue reading Creative Self Emergence and Rilke’s Poetry

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Invocation

What a glorious day!

Now that our rainy season has passed, I’d like to bring it gently back to your mind and possibly into your heart.

On a rainy solstice day in December 1964, a monk, named Thomas Merton, hiked up from the Gesthemane abbey to a little cabin.  He took out a pen and wrote these lines.

“The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with inconsistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer.”

… he continued

“The night became very dark. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, … What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!

Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.”

Let us pray:

God who speaks through rain; we listen; we lower the umbrellas of our minds, open our hearts, and listen to You, to each other, and to the miracle of this moment together.  May your gracious rain soak us through as we celebrate.