“It is where your passions lie, what floats your boat, what moves you that allows you come to see who you really are.” (Niki Bilton, MUIH seminar 2016)
That which is beautiful is subtle and easy to miss. We are deluged with media bites. We speed through social media postings. We are on the go go go. When is it that we allow ourselves the space and the quiet enough to mindfully take in what is around us?
This is the practice of this week: take mindful moments to notice the beautiful, the poignant, the funny, and even the sad. What moves you to feel deeply?
My colleague is moved by Carl Sagan’s short clip the Pale Blue Dot about our human journey on our little blue dot of earth. In the vastness of the cosmos, here we sit on our little blue dot. As I drove to school that the other day, I found myself profoundly moved by Chopin’s Piano Concerto #2 on the radio. I cranked up the volume and was carried away by poignant intensity of the crescendos dropping into soft strains of piano moving up and around and down. It moved me. I felt a welling of emotion in my heart. At this moment, I thought---how often do we in the busy-ness of life mindfully notice what moves us?
I leave you with this poem by John O'Donohue. For even a poem requires us to slow down and mull over the feeling-essence painted for us by the poet:
Vespers
~ John O'Donohue ~
(To Bless the Space Between Us)
As light departs to let the earth be one with night, Silence deepens in the mind, and thoughts grow slow; The basket of twilight brims over with colors Gathered from within the sacred meadows of the day And offered like blessings to the gathering Tenebrae.
After the day's frenzy, may the heart grow still, Gracious in thought for all the day brought, Surprises that dawn could never have dreamed: The blue silence that came to still the mind, The quiver of mystery at the edge of a glimpse, The golden echoes of worlds behind voices.
Tense faces unable to hide what gripped the heart, The abrupt cut of a glance or a word that hurt, The flame of longing that distance darkened, Bouquets of memory gathered on the heart's altar, The thorns of absence in the rose of dream.
And the whole while the unknown underworld Of the mind, turning slowly, in its secret orbit. May the blessing of sleep bring refreshment and release And the Angel of the moon call the rivers of dream To soften the hardened earth of the outside life, Disentangle from the trapped nets the hurts and sorrow, And awaken the young soul for the new tomorrow.