I can't sleep…
There is really only one possible prayer:
Give me to do everything that I do in the day
with a sense of the sacredness of life.
[…]
Tomorrow the world crashes in again.
~ May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude: The Journal of May Sarton
Painting: Taras Loboda, Lady in Red 1961 (via Mennyfox55)
I come into this small room and take a seat on the floor.
I don’t expect miracles.
But I have given myself a sacred space,
and now I simply offer myself the even greater gift of time to use it.
Someday, perhaps, something will happen here.
For now, I love this room,
this emptiness, the fading light, my own quiet company.
I am learning, by sitting, to become,
in the words of Terry Tempest Williams,
“a caretaker of silence, a connoisseur of stillness, a listener of wind.”
~ Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment
Notes:
How to find words
to describe a shift so subtle and internal,
yet so profound that it seems to change everything?
One sacred second, so brief yet seismic?
A movement from a dark, inchoate place of confusion
into a space of clarity and light?
~ Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment
Notes:
Perhaps we wouldn’t need chapels if our lives were already clear and calm (a saint or a Jesus may never need to go into a church; he’s always carrying one inside himself). Chapels are emergency rooms for the soul. They are the one place we can reliably go to find who we are and what we should be doing with our own lives—usually by finding all we aren’t, and what is much greater than us, to which we can only give ourselves up.
“I like the silent church,” Emerson wrote, “before the service begins.”
~ Pico Iyer, Where Silence is Sacred
Image: Groteleur
One thing we’ve learned this summer is that a house is not an end in itself, any more than “home” is just one geographic location where things feel safe and familiar. Home can be anyplace in which we create our own sense of rest and peace as we tend to the spaces in which we eat and sleep and play. It is a place that we create and re-create in every moment, at every stage of our lives, a place where the plain and common becomes cherished and the ordinary becomes sacred.
― Katrina Kenison, The Gift of an Ordinary Day: A Mother’s Memoir
Painting: Edward Gordon, Wind from the Sea, via The Sensual Starfish