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January 7 - January 29, 2023
Legend has it that this is also why we clink glasses before a meal. If, as our glasses or tankards touch, the liquid inside skips over from one into another, we can all be assured of our safety!
Eating together affirms the simple fact of being alive.
Simply looking into one another’s eyes, raising a glass, and saying “It’s good to be together!” reminds us that there’s nothing more to do than delight in one another’s company.
When we’re in the rhythm of the collective, we can be freed of our isolationist perspective. For a brief period of time, the lie of our separateness is exposed, and we remember that we are wholly connected to one another.
people who have regular access to nature are less likely to be on antidepressants.
pilgrimage is simply a transformative journey on foot to a special or sacred place.
Pilgrimage is a multisensory experience. It’s about making contact, getting up close and touching, looking, smelling, listening, even tasting the land around us.
This practice of circumambulation is a key spiritual tool to transform any journey into a pilgrimage. By making repeated circles around our destination, we create a sacred center. Our journey itself honors what we leave in the middle.
A walk you’ve taken before can become a mini pilgrimage if you infuse it with openness to transformation during the experience and a keen, observant attitude.
when we become aware of the home we have in nature, we sense home in whatever place we’re in.
And each time, he takes the same book of poetry with him, finds a spot far from any human ears, and reads the entire book aloud to the majestic peaks and rocky crags around him.
What matters is setting an intention before we head out, paying attention to the natural world along the way—using all five senses if possible—and returning home again with a new perspective.
“Tradition is living and active,” Merton writes, “but convention is passive and dead.”
Tradition, though of course always old, is at the same time always new, because it is forever being born again into a new generation and a new historical context. It will be lived and applied in a new and particular way.
Just because things have been done one way for some time does not mean they should never evolve. What matters is whether what we’re doing feels alive,
He explains that each of us can go ritual-spotting in our own lives to discover how we might develop a sacred practice. “Look at what’s happening naturally around you. Become your own ethnographer,” he says. “Maybe there’s something that you enjoy doing but haven’t named yet. You can amplify that by documenting all the rituals you do.
If the path I’m jogging on has tree canopy above, I look up into the branches and say to the universe, “For the glory of life! I’m running for you, tree!”
we celebrated the feast of Michaelmas on September 29, which signified the beginning of autumn.
There’s something wonderfully comforting about liturgical time.
The wisdom of marking the seasons is that we return to them year in and year out.
Paying attention to it every morning, I notice the subtle signs of passing time. Just like celebrating the seasons, simply noticing this tree every day gives me a rhythm.
Sometimes the bare tree in the drab, gray morning rain speaks to my sadness in a way I hadn’t yet found words for.
we can look out at the natural world as if it were a sacred text, “rereading” the view from one window again and again to find new connections, new meaning.
