781st Week: The Gift of Inspiration
As I write this practice, I—along with most other people in the U.S. and in many places around the world right now—am at home practicing “social distancing”. Because of the current coronavirus pandemic, I’m not having my daily experience of crossing Central Park, to and from my office. I have to say that I miss the powerful and inspiring emergence of Spring in the park as well as the quiet presence of so many trees.
A couple of weeks ago, before we were all asked to stay home, I was in daily amazement at the beautiful colors of this season in the Northern hemisphere, the emergence of abundant, colorful life after the quiet grays and dun colors of winter. As I write this, I’m sitting at a bench I often inhabit on weekend mornings. This is a cool morning and it will be raining soon, but I wanted this early-morning opportunity to touch into this favorite place where I feel deeply connected and attuned to the nature around me.
As I sit here, I find myself wondering, yet again, how did nature ever know to create the brilliant yellows, pinks, and whites of Spring? All around me, trees are in bloom and all over the park are daffodils and other bulbs showing their wonderfully enthusiastic yellows, blues, whites, and purples. These colorful displays speak to my bodymind in ways that bring me alive, that remind me that life seems to always be waiting to express in creative and energetic ways.
For those of you in the Southern hemisphere, your focus of inspiration might be the amazing colors nature generates in Fall, as well as tracking how nature prepares for the quiet, tucked-in months of winter. Here on the East Coast of the United States, that particular display is nothing short of breath-taking each year.
For this week’s practice, I invite you to seek out and soak in whatever offers you an enlivening sense of inspiration. This may mean taking a walk in nature, if that option is available to you. It may mean looking at nature photographs that inspire. It may be listening to music that fills you and touches your soul. Each morning, I have the wonderful gift of posting a daily inspirational quotation and photograph to Devadana Sanctuary on both Facebook and on the Devadana Sanctuary side of my Portal to Multidimensional Living website, www.portaltomdl.com. Finding photographs of nature that resonate with the quotations each morning has become a deeply meaningful meditation time for me and I sometimes find myself moved to tears as I look at photograph after photograph of this beautiful planet on bigstockphoto.com.
Having this particular morning routine has taught me how important it is to have daily sources of inspiration to enliven and nurture myself. So, whatever inspires you, whatever feeds your sense of aliveness, possibility, and/or connection to something larger than yourself and brings it into the foreground of your experience is what you’re looking for with this practice.
There’s no question that many in our global and local human families are suffering and in the throes of terrible experiences with this virus. Many others of us are frightened and stressed because of the unknowns that accompany this pandemic. This practice isn’t to suggest that there aren’t overwhelming things happening. Instead, with wholeness in mind, the practice offers what is also true—that even when we are beset with suffering, sources of inspiration continue to be present and available.
As with all these practices, please remember to bring along curiosity as your constant companion and to pat gently on the head any judgments that may arise. One of the more difficult, and yet profoundly significant, things we can do, moment to moment, is to come back to this breath, right here, right now, to this precise moment where—for most of us—we are okay enough.
