When listening to Krista via On Being, some of the voices I have loved to listen to are Elizabeth Gilbert, Maria Shriver, and even a few men like Pico Iyer, Father James Martin and many others.
I am looking forward to connecting with Benedictine and Ignatian Spirituality - again. This morning I did a guided meditation with a focus on the breath by letting thoughts "float" by like clouds.
I must say that today is a huge, wonderful day since the the new Democratic House was sworn in - one filled with women, women of color, native americans, LGBT, Muslim (our fav congresswoman from MPLS. I feel optimistic and hopeful. It is so interesting, more than 30 Democratic women added to the House - only one Republican woman. Masterful - Nancy Pelosi quoted Ronald Reagan
"If we ever close the door to new Americans, our leadership role in the world will soon be lost". Showed how far the current Republican party has strayed away from the leader the historically have revered for all time.
Journal Prompt #1 What Am I most proud of?
Below are some recent quotes from the On Being project and Brain Pickings that I have enjoyed reading the last few days - quiet days over the 2018 Christmas and New Years holiday.
Quotes from Maria and Krista: (I should grant each quote to the woman who said them - but this journal is for me only - and I love them both) Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.
Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.
Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.
It’s beginning to feel comforting, this reframing — from searching for meaning in minutes and hours and days to resting in the meaning of years and decades and centuries. Look even further out and you reach what Maria Popova calls a “telescopic view of time” — “not merely on the short human timescale of my own life...but on far vaster scales of space and time.” How much has happened, and still how much has yet to unfold.
The purpose of this post is to being to enlarge my writing practice by declaring and defining sme basic premises, such as what are my core beliefs. This will be an exercise that will be like a discovery, it may evolve into a listing of intentions since that is what I am most comfortable at this time. I will add to this blog a little at a time and may continue this exploration in consecutive entries.
Let's begin by naming core beliefs and calling out the things that I will manifest. I acknowledge that if I look back on my journals and writings over the years, some of this "stuff" is not new, many of the issues I have been grappling with and writing about for years. It is different now because I do have a deeper understanding of what drives me and what is worth focusing on. I am also finally mature and confident enough to be able to get rid of the periphery noise and negative self talk to move forward. I am able to embrace what is important and calm enough to be present as this continued discovery of core beliefs, declaring intentions and identification of what adds value for me goes forward.
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