Reflecting on the paths we create
The paths we create are probably not the ones we thought we were making.
We start out thinking of a direction and an endpoint.
And on the way encounter beauty, ideas and people we hadn't expected.
Along with challenges, questions and a kind of reality that creeps up on you unawares.
So we have a choice.
Do we delight in where this path is taking us, or do we forever mourn what we might have thought was rightfully ours?
Yet here's the thing, we have no rights, but we do have possibilities.
And those who take care of the little choices along the way and build a practice of humility and humanity usually create beautiful paths that we love to follow.
Because it's step by glorious small step.
How you unexpectedly attune
To the timbre in some voice,
Opening a conversation
You want to take in
To where your longing
Has pressed hard enough
Inward, on some unsaid dark,
To create a crystal of insight,
You could not have known
You needed
To illuminate
Your way.
Recommended by LinkedIn
When you travel,
A new silence
Goes with you,
And if you listen,
You will hear
What your heart would
Love to say:
A journey can become a sacred thing…
May you travel in an awakened way,
Gathered wisely into your inner ground;
That you may not waste the invitations
Which wait along the way to transform you…
+ John O'Donohue, excerpts from For the Traveller, in Benedictus: a Book of Blessings, Bantam Press, 2007
Walk well and enjoy the colours.
~ Thanks to Paul Stanley for the insight in a Twitter exchange yesterday.
This week
Musings on being, with the help of poetry, during our annual alpaca shearing marathon here in the valley.