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859th Week: Each Small Act Matters
I’ve mentioned a number of times that I post a daily inspirational quote and photograph of our beautiful earth in two places. One is the Devadana Sanctuary Facebook page and the other is on the Devadana Sanctuary side of my Portal to Multidimensional Living. I’ve done this for a number of years now, as the process of choosing the quotation and photograph each day has become a form of meditation for me.
Two recent quotes, one I posted through Devadana Sanctuary, the other posted by someone else on Facebook, touched into a practice that I engage in daily and I wanted to share it with you at this time of the ending of one year, one cycle, and the beginning of the new. First, here are two quotations that touch on what I want to share in this weekly practice:
“I do not think that it is naïve to think that it is the tiny, particular acts of love and joy which are going to swing the balance.” ~ Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet
“We live at a time when the greatest form of courage is to act as if our lives made a difference.”
~ William Sullivan, The Secret of the Inca
821st week: Finding Ways to Share Resources
As the pandemic has continued, and as someone who has been able to work throughout this time, I’ve been exploring ways to donate money and offer support to people who have lost their jobs. With so many people losing work, facing evictions from their homes and experiencing food scarcity, it seems fundamentally important to share resources in whatever ways we can manage. A psychotherapy colleague recently shared with me a way she is responding to the current crisis for people experiencing food scarcity during the pandemic. She located a food bank that was running out of various food items and arranged with Fresh Direct to make a weekly delivery to the food bank. A ministry colleague celebrated his birthday by asking people to donate money to a food bank in his area.
I was truly inspired to read an article about MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, head of Amazon.com. MacKenzie is worth many billions of dollars. She has pledged to give away the majority of her fortune—and she has been true to her word. Here’s a link to the article about how she is doing this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-15/mackenzie-scott-gives-away-4-2-billion-within-four-months
This got me to thinking about how important it is to be aware of local needs in each of our communities, along with whatever other financial support those of us who are working can offer to local as well as larger non-profit organizations. For this week’s practice, I invite you to do some investigating as to the needs of your local community, or even your immediate neighborhood, and to see what you might offer by way of sharing resources.
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858th Week: The Importance of “Awe”
Whenever I go into Central Park, I take time to see what has changed, how the trees look, what wildlife is around. I enjoy listening to the birds and, also, to the many languages I hear on any given day in New York City. This Fall season, I have enjoyed watching the trees change from their brilliant colors to bare branches after their leaves have been released. For me, this time of year brings its own beauty, and during this season I can see the creative, complex, and varied ways that trees find expression in the shapes and reach of their branches. It’s magical to me and I discover new trees every year—trees I have only noticed during their leaf-laden seasons.
This process that is so familiar to me got me to thinking about the importance of looking for inspiration, beauty, and things that are new as part of nourishing our vitality and aliveness. I was surprised to discover that I had a link to the importance of “awe walks” in my notes that fits perfectly with what I’ve experienced this Fall as the trees have taken on their winter look. Here’s a link to that article. (You can click on the blank space and it will take you to the article. For some reason, the link doesn’t offer visible content, but it’s here…)
Even though this article refers to “older people” and some research that was done with this population, the effects of awe apply to us all. There’s been a good bit of research in this area. Here’s a link to an article reflecting the impact of small moments of awe on anyone’s overall health and well-being.
For this week’s practice in conscious living, I invite you to engage in even more “awe walks” than you may already do. Pay attention to what happens in your body, emotional tone, and thoughts as you look for things that inspire, things you didn’t notice before, things that fill you with awe. If you can’t go outdoors, then do this practice in your home, taking time to notice what you have around you that inspires you and also to invite yourself to notice small details that you may have overlooked.
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2021 October Meditation
This month’s meditation continues our focus on wholeness, how it radiates into and touches everything around us, and our underlying relationship with everything we encounter. It also invites us to acknowledge and appreciate the wide variety of our other-than-human earth-kin with whom we share this beautiful planet.
If you’d like to have images of nature with your meditation, here’s our YouTube version:
770th Week: We Cannot *Not* Be Connected
As I write this practice, I’m sitting on a train headed for New York City from Connecticut. I spoke at the Unity Church in Norwalk, CT this morning and some of the things I talked about there I’d like to share as this week’s practice.
There were several themes to my talk this morning. One was the over-arching practice of subtle activism, which may be done through use of prayer, affirmative thoughts and feelings about situations that need support, healing at a distance, and more. The underlying theme that arises when talking about something like subtle activism is that of collective consciousness, and the fact that we are all interconnected whether or not we’re aware of it.
One of the things I asked people to sense into was how it felt to know and experience that all of us in the room were part of one energy organism, with each of us contributing to the radiating quality of presence that was the collective environment we generated together. In past practices, I’ve invited you to pay attention to the focus and quality of your thinking and feeling, knowing that where you resonate becomes magnetic to what you attract. This matters because resonating with a feeling such as gratitude supports an experience of well-being, where resonating with a feeling of anger or resentment supports those states of being. This is because we are part of collective fields of information and presence all the time and, because of this, we are affected by similar feelings and experiences of countless people all around the world.
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