#MicroPoetry|July ’21 Reflections

There often too many voices and messages that leave us depleted and limited. What we are made for, to dream dreams, sometimes becomes a burden, not the fulfillment of the blessing we carry.

What do you need to change to embrace your creativity?
What practices can you add to your journey to translate imagination into being?

There are many things, practices and messages that can distract us from a life lived with intention. One way this happens is living into complacency.

It is easy to be persuaded that life is simply a linear line of one day bleeding into the next. A monotony of continuing from yesterday to tomorrow that has no ark of story or meaning.

Yet, our journey, as spiritual beings, means that as each day arrives it does so having been shaped by the decisions we have made. Whether we have made those, however, with awareness becomes the central turning point.

When we recognise that either unconscious habits or intentional choices shape the day we see, what option shall we nurture?

There are as many understandings of love as there are beings who have, do and will call this planet home. From treatises to poems, paintings to dance, it is a reality that defies superficiality, even in the context in which too often things become products to buy, trade and barter.

In this exploration of love, what might it mean to think of it is a flower?
What if the primary ingredients were joy, happiness and contentment?
What things might we add to our lives to ensure those seeds were well sown?

Each morning, as I begin my day, I look at my Outlook calendar. It is colour coded based on area of work or subjects connected with household duties. I find this both comforting and, also, recognise it is a temptation that can lead me to a false sense of control.

Control is something we all want. It is Intrinsic to an organisation, whether a family, a pack, a company or a country. We collect and structure ourselves to ensure stability and safety.

And yet, this distraction can leave us slow and clumsy in the reality that life’s unfolding is ultimately about change. Whether slow and predictable or shocking and jarring, we must not lose this sense of awareness. When this wisdom is coupled with wonder, we have the agency to prepare ourselves and those whom we companion to walk into a future we will never see.

Part of this intention in this Now is to take seriously what we have inherited and ways of being that can either oppress or liberate not just me, but us. If we take this challenge today, do we live it out joyfully or with apathy? Wonder or cynicism?

As you consider these questions, which one gives you energy to move toward that beckoning tomorrow?

Wisdom is an interesting concept. Sometimes it is understood as a goal, other times as the fruition of an intentional journey of self-inspection and reflection. All of which are indeed noble pursuits.

What if wisdom and its discernment, its revelation and attainment, is understood as a collective pursuit?
What might collaboration mean for a community?
How might decision making change, if our goal was wisdom and not, necessarily, external acquisition?

I like how the words ‘bravery’ and ‘kindness’ can seem both complementary and in tension. I would like to imagine that the former is how we should try to place them together and how they might portend a gentler more compassionate world when seen as companions. Ones that we are invited to embed in our everyday being and living, choosing and acting.

What do kindness and bravery say to you?

Time is a funny thing. It is how we count the days through our living and doing. Sometimes it is helpful to motivate and inspire. Other times, it causes anxiety and worry.

We live in this stream trying to find balance to stay upright and embrace opportunities that reveal wonder and possibility. To strike that equilibrium there is a central wisdom upon which must affix our attention: in this very moment, our choices have and will affect the stream in which we journey from our birth to our dying.