Day 319, Tuesday, November 19, 2024
Reflections
Inspiration
If you haven’t experienced the depth of awestruck moments, you are a breathing body merely pumping blood. Your mind goes everywhere you don’t want to go. But making or appreciating art, reading, writing, and travel make you realize you are more than your body. You realize you are capable of experiencing aesthetic delight and peak moments of spirituality. These may be transient but they deepen and heighten the quality of your life. You know how you can glimpse divinity within you. You also know your imagination has no limits.
What I’m saying may inspire you, even magnetize you to the practice, but at the back of your mind remain the questions of how to pay the rent, buy food, or perhaps attend to an ailing family member. You are tethered to your daily life. Yet I’d say without linking to something creative and spiritual, there is no hope. When you make space for the artistic and the sacred, this good inner stuff seeps in until it simply flows into your outer life.
Be always grateful. And be always generous. Then find time and space for your practice. Crave what is meaningful to you. Longing is good. When grief visits you, go through its sadness. It will cleanse you. It may even inspire you. But don’t get stuck in it. Come back to the practice; it will make you feel good. Look around. What goodness surrounds you – within your family, your community, your culture, your books? Imbibe good from these people and places, the lack and sadness will evaporate.
Nature, good books, and master artworks are all potent with enchantments. These magical things wait patiently for you to come to them. Cross the threshold fearlessly. You can’t encounter flowerbeds unless you take a stroll through the garden.
Journal Prompt
Have you ever been frustrated, trying to learn something new? How did you handle the situation? Did you overcome or succumb?
Today’s Practice
Meditation: “Gratitude”
Read, reflect, and journal.
Lorraine
This was the year of a stressful move, being away from everyone and everything familiar, and now caregiving… unblocking every morning, meditating, creating and connecting has been a blessing. It has given me strength and focus. I’m grateful for you, Madhu!! I don’t know how I would have gotten through this year without you. (Love the painting!)
Madhu B. Wangu
Good morning, Lorraine!
It seems we’ve gone through similar changes. Moving to a new place in a new state, getting to know new people as we get intimately familiar with our new home.
But I don’t know what I’d have done in the wilderness of my website if you and Jenn had not accompanied me with your wise advice and warm friendship. I’m grateful and happy to be charting this new path in the final stage of my life.
Jenn Diamond
Good late-morning, Madhu! I am so grateful for you, and I feel your love and gratitude and it makes me elated! Your words are rewritten in my notebook today, “You can’t encounter flowerbeds unless you take a stroll through the garden.” I’m so grateful to be strolling through the garden with you and Mindful Writers/Artists! (*beautiful painting, as Lorraine said!)
Madhu B. Wangu
Thank you, Jenn! That phrase is from Rumi’s collection of poems. So many of his poems awaken the reader with a jolt! The stun startles with pleasure of knowing.
That’s one of my watercolors that I painted in 1979.