Everyday Is A Gift Quotes

I want a life that sizzles and pops and makes me laugh out loud. And I don't want to get to the end, or to tomorrow, even, and realize that my life is a collection of meetings and pop cans and errands and receipts and dirty dishes. I want to eat cold tangerines and sing out loud in the car with the windows open and wear pink shoes and stay up all night laughing and paint my walls the exact color of the sky right now. I want to sleep hard on clean white sheets and throw parties and eat ripe tomatoes and read books so good they make me jump up and down, and I want my everyday to make God belly laugh, glad that he gave life to someone who loves the gift.

The most significant gifts are the ones most easily overlooked. Small, everyday blessings: woods, health, music, laughter, memories, books, family, friends, second chances, warm fireplaces, and all the footprints scattered throughout our days.

Perhaps the greatest gift an animal has to offer is a permanent reminder of who we really are.

At the deepest level, there is no giver, no gift, and no recipient... only the universe rearranging itself.

A boy said,“Everybody is my friend.”Beloved said,“No, not everybody can be your friend.” Boy said, “Each one of them is gifted to teach me something new in my life.” Beloved said, “I still don’t agree.” Boy again smilingly said, “Don’t divide human, ...divide your soul, you will have everybody as friend. In short, Friends are your own soul divided from you, who will guide you when you will move away from your path.

You were born into a state of grace. It is impossible for you to leave it. You will die in a state of grace whether or not special words are spoken for you, or water or oil is poured upon your head. You share this blessing with the animals and all other living things. You cannot fall out of grace, nor can it be taken from you. You can ignore it. You can hold beliefs that blind you to its existence. You will still be graced but unable to perceive you own uniqueness and integrity, and blind also to other attributes with which you are automatically gifted.

Claire Waverley has started a successful new venture, Waverley’s Candies. Though her handcrafted confections—rose to recall lost love, lavender to promote happiness and lemon verbena to soothe throats and minds—are singularly effective, the business of selling them is costing her the everyday joys of her family, and her belief in her own precious gifts.

We must pray to God everyday to show we don't forget that all gifts come from Him. But if some wishes remain unfulfilled we must show our confidence in Him, for He knows best.

You can’t colour your world with someone’s paint.

However, amidst the bouquets of laughter that people tried to gift me, there was that memory of yours, lips curled up in a fashion, which makes my heart skip a beat even now. And then the happiness felt incomplete, because I missed you, missed you everyday more than the previous day.

St. Teresa of Avila wrote: 'All difficulties in prayer can be traced to one cause: praying as if God were absent.' This is the conviction that we bring with us from early childhood and apply to everyday life and to our lives in general. It gets stronger as we grow up, unless we are touched by the Gospel and begin the spiritual journey. This journey is a process of dismantling the monumental illusion that God is distant or absent.

You are a gift, so open yourself everyday to see the beauty with love, wonder and feel the joy.

God gives us something amazing when he gives us life, and I want to live with gratitude. I want to live in a way that shows how much I appreciate the gift.

You have tremendous gifts to give; God sent them with you when you came to this earth. And while you might forget them, or doubt they exist, God does not forget and He will show them to you. As soon as your gifts are dedicated to His work, they will blossom. Chains that might have held you back for years will dissolve. And you will feel free. You will learn that your spirit is bigger than your circumstances, as soon as you put your spirit first.

Friendship is a gift forever; Cherish everyday, forget it never

Gifted people cannot escape a sense of calling, a mandate to put their abilities to the test of time and constructive purpose. This is the true legacy of giftedness, the sense of responsibility to leave something valuable behind.

Books have formed the soul of me. I know that spiritual formation is of God, but I also know—mainly because I learned it from books—that there are other kinds of formation, too, everyday gifts, and that God uses the things of this earth to teach us and shape us, and to help us find truth.

The morning is in itself a miracle, the chance to be able to live life - is the greatest gift we have. The morning is a reminder of that, every day.

Counting one thousand gifts means counting the hard things — otherwise I’ve miscounted.

The answer to anxiety is always to exalt Christ.

Too many people fail to answer opportunity’s knock at the door because they have to finish some preconceived plan.

we also discover that much of our most potent creative energy arises from the flames of past injustices and inhibited creative efforts.

The psalmist declares, “This is the day that the Lord has made.” This one. We wake not to a vague or general mercy from a far-off God. God, in delight and wisdom, has made, named, and blessed this average day. What I in my weakness see as another monotonous day in a string of days, God has given as a singular gift.

How should we respond when we find the Word perplexing or dry or boring or unappealing? We keep eating. We receive nourishment. We keep listening and learning and taking our daily bread. We wait on God to give us what we need to sustain us one more day. We acknowledge that there is far more wonder in this life of worship than we yet have eyes to see or stomachs to digest. We receive what has been set before us today as a gift.

The complete answer is not in these pages, but there’s enough to get you started, Mary. You’re bright, sensitive, intense, and driven. That’s who you are,

The moment of perceiving something beautiful confers on the perceiver the gift of life.

Everyday is a gift and a very special day; so let us celebrate with joy and profound gratitude.

Heidegger spoke of two modes of existence: the everyday mode and the ontological mode. In the everyday mode we are consumed with and distracted by material surroundings - we are filled with wonderment about how things are in the world. In the ontological mode we are focused on being per se - that is, we are filled with wonderment that things are in the world.

Every morning, when we wake up, we have twenty-four brand-new hours to live. What a precious gift! We have the capacity to live in a way that these twenty-four hours will bring peace, joy, and happiness to ourselves and others.

Jesus embraced His not enough ... He gives thanks ... and there is more than enough. More than enough. Eucharisteo always precedes the miracle. And who doesn't need a miracle like that everyday? Thanksgiving makes time. The real problem of life is never a lack of time. The real problem of life - in my life - is lack of thanksgiving. Thanksgiving creates abundance; and he miracle of multiplying happens when I give thanks - ...it's giving thanks to God for this moment that multiplies the moments, time made enough. I am thank-full. I am time-full. page 72

Show up for your own life, he said. Don't pass your days in a stupor, content to swallow whatever watery ideas modern society may bottle-feed you through the media, satisfied to slumber through life in an instant-gratification sugar coma. The most extraordinary gift you've been given is your own humanity, which is about conciousness, so honor that consciousness. Revere your senses; don't degrade them with drugs, with depression, with wilful oblivion. Try to notice something new everyday, Eustace said. Pay attention to even the most modest of daily details. Even if you're not in the woods, be aware at all times. Notice what food tastes like; notice what the detergent aisle in the supermarket smells like and recognize what those hard chemical smells do to your senses; notice what bare feet fell like; pay attention every day to the vital insights that mindfulness can bring. And take care of all things, of every single thing there is - your body, your intellect, your spirit, your neighbours, and this planet. Don't pollute your soul with apathy or spoil your health with junk food any more than you would deliberately contaminate a clean river with industrial sludge.

Just remember to say THANK YOU sometimes, for all of these everyday extraordinary gifts.

To fully express the true self is at best a calculated risk.

The idiosyncrasies of giftedness are rarely seen as “different = interesting,” but instead are deemed “different = wrong.

What if I gave thanks in the trouble, for the trouble, because the trouble is a gift that causes me to turn? What if I loved God not for His goods but for His love itself that is goodness enough?

The habit of praying before my meal trains me in a way of being-in-the-world. It reminds me that my personal experience is not what determines whether or not something is a grace and a wonder, and that some of the most astonishing gifts are the most easily overlooked.

My works and worship don’t earn a thing. Instead, they flow from God’s love, gift, and work on my behalf. I am not primarily defined by my abilities or marital status or how I vote or my successes or failures or fame or obscurity, but as one who is sealed in the Holy Spirit, hidden in Christ, and beloved by the Father. My naked self is one who is baptized.

Pray for people who are in a better situation than you are, who are more gifted than you are, or who currently have wonderful circumstances coming their way. Rejoice with those who rejoice. Pray for someone else’s promotion, someone else’s pregnancy, someone else’s healing. That crucifies envy.

Well, no one says you can be happy about everything," I said. "I know I should be glad for you, Megan, but frankly I think you're crazy. And if Reverend Marshall is making you this way, I think he's evil. This life, this everyday existence, is the one gift we're given. To throw it away, to want to be dead, to me that's the sin.

To forgive is to put oneself in a larger gravitational field of experience than the one that first seemed to hurt us. We reimagine ourselves in the light of our maturity and we reimagine the past in the light of our new identity, we allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft.

By definition, astral (or psychic-level) experience is flashier than anything human. By contrast, how about everyday, human frequencies? It takes a certain kind of humility to explore them. Yet living here on Earth School, your main job is being human.

The world also needs to remember to never take for granted what has been gifted to us through the sacrifice of others: the right to an education and learning, the power and luxury of freedom, and the beauty to appreciate the routine of simple, everyday life.

What if you gave someone a gift, and they neglected to thank you for it—would you be likely to give them another? Life is the same way. In order to attract more of the blessings that life has to offer, you must truly appreciate what you already have." Ralph Marston

The nice cutlery set, tea, wine, clothes, open, quilt that you have been saving for a special occasion— use them whenever you get the chance. Special moments are not separate from our everyday lives. When you make use of something special, it makes the moment special

Expectations kill relationships — especially with God.

While I may not always feel joy, God asks me to give thanks in all things because He knows that the feeling of joy begins in the action of thanksgiving.

The everyday was king. And the courtiers were popularization, superficiality, doubt, cynicism. The century was exhausted.

The life that counts blessings discovers its yielding more than it seems.

Marriage is love put to it's ultimate test - the grindstone of life. Where the idealism of love meets the everydayness of marriage.

This life, this everyday existence, is the one gift we’re given. To throw it away, to want to be dead, to me that’s the sin.

Memory is a fickle thing, a flickering light in a darkroom of possibilities.

Don’t belittle everyday pots and pans — they are the means to carry theology into the everyday of our lives.

It's never too late to forgive someone and let go of some hurt. Life is short. We only really have this very moment! To live it fully is a gift we give back to ourselves.

Unless we understand how it really works and find a a way to express it, giftedness can become a heavy burden.

I am all the clichés that made me so mad several months ago. I believe in the gift of pain. I believe that loss deepens us.

There is this: We give thanks to God not because of how we feel but because of who He is.

Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world. Sarah Ban Breathnach

For them, health, or well-being, is more than getting by, existing, or making do. Knowing thyself means puzzling out how identity and fulfillment, meaning and destiny, are inextricably linked.

If God is love, if God is gift given eternally, then our participation in the life of God happens not by escaping our everyday world, but by entering more deeply into the life of love and that paradoxical logic of gift in that we receive most richly only when we make "gifting" others a way of life.

Let me pull you close and whisper a heart-stopping truth. That daily stuff—those responsibilities that seem more like distractions—those things we want to rush and just get through to get on with the better and bigger assignments of life—those things that are unnoticed places of service? They are the very experiences from which we unlock the riches of wisdom. We’ve got to practice wisdom in the everyday places of our lives. Never despise the mundane. Embrace it. Unwrap it like a gift. And be one of the rare few who looks deeper than just the surface. See something more in the everyday. It’s there.

They realize they are intense, complex, and driven, but they have been taught that their strong personalities are perceived as excessive, too different from the norm, and consequently wrong. In a culture that often equates different with wrong, it’s inevitable that gifted adults point a critical finger

Most gifted adults were socialized in a way that encouraged them to dismiss such deep inquiry. Finding answers to their most profound existential speculations is a task that requires immeasurable courage and fortitude.

...home is less a location than a discipline. It is a way of being, a domestic, considered attention to familiar routines and the small, essential details of everyday life. From now on, I promised myself, home would be wherever I was, not the place that I one day hoped it to be. I would create it by being present. I would try to do better.

But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering, without hypocrisy. And the seed whose fruit is righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.”   James 3:17–18

Lord God, Maker of all, when You give manna moments, may I give You thanks for the mystery. Because the manna that makes no sense — You will make it my sustenance. Today, in all the “what is it?” moments, turn me to give thanks for who You are.

Intellectually, she recognized the summer could’ve lasted only so many days, but, in remembrance, it seemed to last epochs, from the creation of the Milky Way to its expiration. Not because the time was dull but rather it was so damn fun and so life-affirming, it could’ve been a magical potion concocted to revive the dead. Even in her advanced age, she could see that time, so clearly delineated in what the novelist John Dos Passos called the Camera Eye—mental snapshots, frozen in bliss, which neither age nor time could mar their perfection.

their intellectual and emotional intensities, are mistaken for something else; hence there are mistaken identities by the millions. Instead of being viewed as exceptionally aware, insightful, and responsive, gifted people naturally exhibit traits that are considered excessive.

The divine mandate to use the world justly and charitably, then, defines every person's moral predicament as that of a steward. But this predicament is hopeless and meaningless unless it produces an appropriate discipline: stewardship. And stewardship is hopeless and meaningless unless it involves long-term courage, perseverance, devotion, and skill. This skill is not to be confused with any accomplishment or grace of spirit or of intellect. It has to do with everyday proprieties in the practical use and care of the created things - with "right livelihood.

What elevates one and not another to the level of genius is not only talent and ambition and luck, but a gift for turning everything to the purpose. ... Perhaps that is a common element in the story of genius: beyond talent and ambition and luck, in some degree you have to be forcibly booted out of everyday life and everyday goals. In any case, it was like that with Brahms. The fulfillment of love was denied him so that other things might take wing.

More importantly, I didn’t know then that one day I would genuinely be free. That freedom came out of a thousand small steps of obedience, most of which I took during the waiting or limbo time. The more I learned to lean into Him on a daily basis and simply live out my faith in the everyday elements, the more I was prepared for the bigger steps when they arrived. Not only that, I was given the gift of living my life fully in the present, rather than being fixated and frustrated over some distant time or hope. In the crossroads called limbo, you do arrive at mile markers. You become more mature. More healed. Less surprised by or resistant to or unprepared for the good things God is giving you in the ordinary. Your challenge is to begin to embrace the waiting times as part of the overall journey. Limbo is a key part of the healing process! As you are faithful daily, He is working in you powerfully, and it all counts. Every single moment!

Corn, beans, and squash were once all my people needed. They were so essential to our everyday lives that we referred to them as our sisters. We would preserve each plant's seeds and pass them on to our children, knowing that with this gift, they would be able to provide the same nutritious food for their families that we provided for them. This was an act of absolute, undiminished intergenerational love. And if intergenerational trauma can alter DNA, why can't intergenerational love?

Faith is a gift of spirit that allows the soul to remain attached to its own unfolding. When faith is soulful, it is always planted in the soil of wonder and questioning. It isn’t a defensive and anxious holding on to certain objects of belief, because doubt, as its shadow, can be brought into a faith that is fully mature. Imagine

More profoundly, Nihilist "simplification" may be seen in the universal prestige today accorded the lowest order of knowledge, the scientific, as well as the simplistic ideas of men like Marx, Freud, and Darwin, which underlie virtually the whole of contemporary thought and life. We say "life," for it is important to see that the Nihilist history of our century has not been something imposed from without or above, or at least has not been predominantly this; it has rather presupposed, and drawn its nourishment from, a Nihilist soil that has long been preparing in the hearts of the people. It is precisely from the Nihilism of the commonplace, from the everyday Nihilism revealed in the life and thought and aspiration of the people, that all the terrible events of our century have sprung. The world-view of Hitler is very instructive in this regard, for in him the most extreme and monstrous Nihilism rested upon the foundation of a quite unexceptional and even typical Realism. He shared the common faith in "science," "progress," and "enlightenment" (though not, of course, in "democracy"), together with a practical materialism that scorned all theology, metaphysics, and any thought or action concerned with any other world than the "here and now," priding himself on the fact that he had "the gift of reducing all problems to their simplest foundations." He had a crude worship of efficiency and utility that freely tolerated "birth control", laughed at the institution of marriage as a mere legalization of a sexual impulse that should be "free", welcomed sterilization of the unfit, despised "unproductive elements" such as monks, saw nothing in the cremation of the dead but a "practical" question and did not even hesitate to put the ashes, or the skin and fat, of the dead to "productive use." He possessed the quasi-anarchist distrust of sacred and venerable institutions, in particular the Church with its "superstitions" and all its "outmoded" laws and ceremonies. He had a naive trust in the "natural mom, the "healthy animal" who scorns the Christian virtues--virginity in particular--that impede the "natural functioning" of the body. He took a simple-minded delight in modern conveniences and machines, and especially in the automobile and the sense of speed and "freedom" it affords. There is very little of this crude Weltanschauung that is not shared, to some degree, by the multitudes today, especially among the young, who feel themselves "enlightened" and "liberated," very little that is not typically "modern.

What I in my weakness see as another monotonous day in a string of days, God has given as a singular gift.

Giving these students, teenagers, any form of power over the use of their own words, allowing them to turn everyday raw material into some form of beauty, is a gift beyond measure.

Great thinkers are the grateful thankers — the real greats live gratefully.

I am thankful to God everyday for the Gift of Life because even if I were the richest in the world, I still wouldn't afford to buy Life.

Start with a simple request, making it the refrain of your day: 'God, open the eyes of my heart.' This journey must be Spirit-led, every day.

Life is dessert — too brief to hurry.

Each small task of everyday life is part of the total harmony of the universe. —SAINT TERESA OF LISIEUX

Life at its fullest is this sensitive, detonating sphere, and it can be carried only in the hands of the unhurried and reverential — a bubble held in awe.

His secret purpose framed from the very beginning [is] to bring us to our full glory. 1 Corinthians 2:7 NEB

God put me on earth for a few specific reasons. Being your mom was the most important and I I thank Him everyday for the opportunity and gift.

It’s the battle plan of the enemy of the soul — to keep us blind to this current moment, the one we can’t control, to keep us blind to Him, the One who controls everything.

we are all driven by the urge to meet our needs. What if one of our most fundamental needs is to have things be just so?

it is the desire of the gifted person to live authentically and not suppress the First Nature traits that produce what some consider aberrant behavior.

I speak it to God: I don’t really want more time; I just want enough time, time to do my one life well.

larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it.

It is not easy to recognize, the talent of the individual who contributes to the lives of others by sharing a natural gift in everyday life.

As G. K. Chesterton wrote, “How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it.”22

Grace — that is what the full life is full of, what the God-glory is full of.

How do you open the eyes to see how to take the daily, domestic, workday vortex and invert it into the dome of an everyday cathedral?

Eucharisteo makes the knees the vantage point of a life.

Don’t depend on someone else’s plumages to define your beauty. You have brighter and beautiful feathers. Just fly with them!

Ben Says: Try your best to view everyday as being a gift...even if it doesn't feel like one. It'll better your life!:) Timothy Pina Bullying Ben

I am very glad to be alive together in the world with all of you. People who read are gifted with invisible friends everyday! But all of you are not invisible. But you are friends.

It is a blessed gift to witness the beauty of each day.

I know I can’t experience deep joy in God until I deep trust in God.

Christ at the end of a cross can upend whole worlds and everything lands aright.

Love is ridiculous and reconfigures everything.

I stop the spinning thoughts, the probing questions, the hands sorting, the laundry work, because God needs knees more than hands.

The well is always here. God is always here — precisely because He does care.

gifted children perceive the world in fundamentally different ways

focused on interpersonal relationships between bright, strong-willed adults

because often the counterpart to high potential is feeling trapped and unsure while not knowing why.

In many ways, commonplace ratings such as “normal/abnormal” and “acceptable/unacceptable” hamper the gifted person who requires not either/or dichotomies but an accepting,

Does advanced ability deserve the same investment of time, money, and attention as disability?

When the purity of Jesus lies over a heart, His transparency burns the cataracts off the soul. The only way to see God manifested in the world around is with the eyes of Jesus within.

To embellish reality with makeup, with silk and royal purple, isn’t that what we all should be doing? Beneath the life we live every day the silk and the purple are hiding, waiting for us. A person just has to dare to throw off his everyday clothes, to rip them off and to put on the silk and purple that exist, I know it. But we’re the ones who cover them up. Out of boredom, indifference, fear. Mostly fear. So right from the first moment I met you, my lies were always the truth: in telling them I unveiled the world for you — the hidden world, the true world. You were really the one who lied. You wanted everything to remain untouched, paradise to be paradise, and me angel. But you made a fatal mistake: you never believed me. You never understood why I lied, that through my lies I was giving you a unique gift: the truth. You always tried to control me — out of love, of course. But is there any word more ambiguous than the word “love”?

Our fall is always first a failure to give thanks. The pride of thanklessness always comes before the fall. God makes Himself plain and there’s no excuse — but they did not give Him thanks.

Lord God, You are the Hound of heaven who hunts the lost down and captures us with grace. Today, make me the hound of now who hunts for glory and captures joy with just that one word: Thanks.

Seeing and acknowledging how gifted assets can get out of control and become liabilities is possibly the most significant step in the quest to complete healing. Consequently we must deal with the shadow side of giftedness—our false-self reactions to people and situations when our primary wounds are reopened—or when our unmanaged assets turn against us in the form of disorderly conduct.

Clairintuition is an expanded metaphysical lexicon beyond the everyday language of the soul. It is a supernatural perception aptitude or gift, and not merely a form of ‘developed’ inner guidance.

God wants to give us not just lives of holiness and prayer but also of sufficient rest. And perhaps a key step toward a life of prayer and holiness is simply receiving the gift of a good night's sleep.

I didn’t start with any specific steps, but through this intentional, daily practice of giving thanks, I found myself on a transformative journey that affected every aspect of my life — including all the broken places.

Lord, You are the only lens that can correct the vision of a life. And if I don’t hunger daily for the bread of Your Word, I’ll develop sight deficiency. Make me Word reflective — that I may have the right perspective.

when we love ourselves as we are while striving to be better everyday aiming to live to our truest potential, we show appreciation for the gifts we've been given and honor the beauty of uniqueness we carry in our heart

Error regarding life necessary to life. - Every belief in the value and dignity of life rests on false thinking; it is possible only through the fact that empathy with the universal life and suffering of mankind is very feebly developed in the individual. Even those rarer men who think beyond themselves at all have an eye, not for this universal life, but for fenced-off portions of it. If one knows how to keep the exceptions principally in view, I mean the greatly gifted and pure of soul, takes their production for the goal of world-evolution and rejoices in the effects they in turn produce, one may believe in the value of life, because the one is overlooking all other men: thinking falsely, that is to say. And likewise if, though one does keep in view all mankind, one accords validity only to one species of drives, the less egoistical, and justifies them in face of all the others, then again one can hope for something of mankind as a whole and to this extent believe in the value of life: thus, in this case too, through falsity of thinking. Whichever of these attitudes one adopts, however, one is by adopting in an exception among men. The great majority endure life without complaining overmuch; they believe in the value of existence, but they do so precisely because each of them exists for himself alone, refusing to step out of himself as those exceptions do: everything outside themselves they notice not at all or at most as a dim shadow. Thus for the ordinary, everyday man the value of life rests solely on the fact that regards himself more highly than he does the world. The great lack of imagination from which he suffers means he is unable to feel his way into other beings and thus he participates as little as possible in their fortunes and sufferings. He, on the other hand, who really could participate in them would have to despair of the value of life; if he succeeded in encompassing and feeling within himself the total consciousness of mankind he would collapse with a curse on existence - for mankind has as a whole no goal, and the individual man when he regards its total course cannot derive from it any support or comfort, but must be reduced to despair. If in all he does he has before him the ultimate goallessness of man, his actions acquire in his own eyes the character of useless squandering. But to feel thus squandered, not merely as an individual fruits but as humanity as a whole, in the way we behold the individual fruits of nature squandered, is a feeling beyond all other feelings. - But who is capable of such a feeling? Certainly only a poet: and poets always know how to console themselves.

We wake not to a vague or general mercy from a far-off God. God, in delight and wisdom, has made, named, and blessed this average day. What I in my weakness see as another monotonous day in a string of days, God has given as a singular gift.

A long time ago American teacher, philosopher, and reformer John Dewey had a nagging suspicion that IQ might get out of hand: “The intelligence-testing business reminds me of the way they used to weigh hogs in Texas. They would get a long plank, put it over a cross-bar, and somehow tie the hog on one end of the plank. They’d search all around till they found a stone that would balance the weight of the hog and they’d put that on the other end of the plank. Then they’d guess the weight of the stone.

The denunciation and smearing of truly gifted people like Rodriguez—people the Chicano community should be proud of—by the self-appointed gatekeepers of Chicano Studies is, alas, an everyday spectacle. (Did anyone in the Chicano Studies community even take note when Dana Gioia, who is one of the best poets of his generation and happens to be half Mexican American, was named chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2002? No, because he made it on his merits and not by being a victimization hustler.)

Lord God, I claim Christ as my bridge back to You and I trust the Bridge Builder to hold all the moments of my life — and me. Remind me today, Lord, to give thanks to You for always holding. I am relieved of the burdens when I’ve believed in the Bridge Builder.

Could it be — no one receives the peace of God without giving thanks to God? Is thankfulness really but the deep, contented breath of peacefulness? Is this why God asks us to give thanks even when things look a failure? When there doesn’t seem much to give thanks for?

I read it slowly. In the original language, “he gave thanks” reads “eucharisteo.” I underline it on the page. The root word of eucharisteo is charis, meaning “grace.” Jesus took the bread and saw it as grace and gave thanks. He took the bread and knew it to be gift and gave thanks.

When we choose to deeply question our fears, our fear thoughts vanish, and when we choose to connect with our wisdom within, we create grander solutions for our challenges. These grand solutions are great gifts; not only for us personally, but for the collective consciousness of humanity.

Capacity for keen observation • Exceptional ability to predict and foresee problems and trends • Special problem-solving resources; extraordinary tolerance for ambiguity; fascination with dichotomous puzzles • Preference for original thinking and creative solutions • Excitability, enthusiasm, expressiveness, and renewable energy • Heightened sensitivity, intense emotion, and compassion • Playful attitude and childlike sense of wonder throughout life • Extra perceptivity, powerful intuition, persistent curiosity, potential for deep insight, early spiritual experiences • Ability to learn rapidly, concentrate for long periods of time, comprehend readily, and retain what is learned; development of more than one area of expertise • Exceptional verbal ability; love of subtleties of written and spoken words, new information, theory, and discussion • Tendency to set own standards and evaluate own efforts • Unusual sense of humor, not always understood by others • Experience of feeling inherently different or odd • History of being misunderstood and undersupported • Deep concerns about universal issues and nature, and reverence for the interconnectedness of all things • Powerful sense of justice and intolerance for unfairness • Strong sense of independence and willingness to challenge authority • Awareness of an inner force that “pulls” for meaning, fulfillment, and excellence • Feelings of urgency about personal destiny and a yearning at a spiritual level for answers to existential puzzles

The enlightened worry more about the problems of the world than about their own problems, and their longing for the well-being of all life grows deeper, making the suffering of all people, all creatures, and all things their own. This is a gift brought by enlightenment, which, at the same time, brings deep anguish.

When I describe for my far-away friends the Northwest’s subtle shades of weather — from gloaming skies of ‘high-gray’ to ‘low-gray’ with violet streaks like the water’s delicate aura — they wonder if my brain and body have, indeed, become water-logged. Yet still, I find myself praising the solace and privacy of fine, silver drizzle, the comforting cloaks of salt, mold, moss, and fog, the secretive shelter of cedar and clouds. Whether it’s in the Florida Keys, along the rocky Maine coast, within the Gulf of Mexico’s warm curves, on the brave Outer Banks; or, for those who nestle near inland seas, such as the brine-steeped Great Salk Lake or the Midwest’s Great Lakes — water is alive and in relationship with those of us who are blessed with such a world-shaping, yet abiding, intimate ally. Every day I am moved by the double life of water — her power and her humility. But most of all, I am grateful for the partnership of this great body of inland sea. Living by water, I am never alone. Just as water has sculpted soil and canyon, it also molds my own living space, and every story I tell. …Living by water restores my sense of balance and natural rhythm — the ebb and flow of high tides and low tides, so like the rise and fall of everyday life. Wind, water, waves are not simply a backdrop to my life, they are steady companions. And that is the grace, the gift of inviting nature to live inside my home. Like a Chambered Nautilus I spin out my days, drifting and dreaming, nurtured by marine mists, like another bright shell on the beach, balancing on the back of a greater body.

To forgive is to put oneself in a larger gravitational field of experience than the one that first seemed to hurt us. We reimagine ourselves in the light of our maturity and we reimagine the past in the light of our new identity; we allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft.

Being empathic is so much a part of everyday discourse—popular singers warble platitudes about being in the other’s skin, walking in the other’s moccasins—that we tend to forget the complexity of the process. It is extraordinarily difficult to know really what the other feels; far too often we project our own feelings onto the other.

A quote has an even more powerful effect if we presume not just a particular author behind it, but God, nature, the unconscious, labor, or difference. These are strong fetishes, each conjuring the powerful submedial in a particular way. Yet all of them must nonetheless be exchanged in a certain rhythm according to the laws of the medial economy. In order to create such fetishes, one does not have to use brilliant quotes by famous authors but can use anonymous quotes that stem from the author- less realm of the everyday, lowly, foreign, vulgar, aggressive, or stupid. Precisely such quotes produce the effect of medial sincerity, that is, the revelation of a deeply submerged, hidden, medial plane on the familiar medial surface. It then appears as if this surface had been blasted open from the inside and that the respective quotes had sprung forth from the submedial interior—like aliens. All of this, of course, refers to the economy of the quote as a gift that can be offered, accepted, and reciprocated.

The stories featured a heroine who was, like Beth, blessed with the gift of easy laughter. They were tales of commonplace courage and optimism, for I knew from my own experience that everyday virtues endure best, and that quiet courage is worth more than the grandest derring-do. Thus “Aunt Dimity” was born, a heroine for the common woman.

When I go looking for glimpses of Him, when I seek to fill the empty places with more of Him who is beauty, my equilibrium recalibrates to find its center in the Judge who became grace to bestow grace and I can rightly read the scale, feel it inside, and know it’s true: If you can really see — the weight of Glory always tips the scales for joy.

Just because they can’t feel it doesn’t mean that I have to forget, Everyday we get closer to a greater truth, a gift to accept, Now you may call me a liar or even call me a fake, But then life is a lesson you have to take, Everyday is a revision of how to count the price of frozen tears, Verdicts would change when we meet the truth between years.

Though diagnosis is unquestionably critical in treatment considerations for many severe conditions with a biological substrate (for example, schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, major affective disorders, temporal lobe epilepsy, drug toxicity, organic or brain disease from toxins, degenerative causes, or infectious agents), diagnosis is often counterproductive in the everyday psychotherapy of less severely impaired patients. Why? For one thing, psychotherapy consists of a gradual unfolding process wherein the therapist attempts to know the patient as fully as possible. A diagnosis limits vision; it diminishes ability to relate to the other as a person. Once we make a diagnosis, we tend to selectively inattend to aspects of the patient that do not fit into that particular diagnosis, and correspondingly overattend to subtle features that appear to confirm an initial diagnosis. What’s more, a diagnosis may act as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Relating to a patient as a “borderline” or a “hysteric” may serve to stimulate and perpetuate those very traits. Indeed, there is a long history of iatrogenic influence on the shape of clinical entities, including the current controversy about multiple-personality disorder and repressed memories of sexual abuse. And keep in mind, too, the low reliability of the DSM personality disorder category (the very patients often engaging in longer-term psychotherapy).

How do we make joy a habit in our everyday lives so our reflex is always love for the people around us? I can’t think of a better way than gratitude. When we’re intentional about giving thanks for everything we come across, we can’t help but feel joy over the pure gift of another day. And when our joy has become a habit, our love becomes a way of living.

Love is a gift without any strings attached. This means that with it comes the knowledge that not all relationships are meant to endure with equal strength indefinitely. Remember that you are also a season, a reason, and a lifetime friend to different people at different times, and the role you play in someone else’s life won’t always match the role they play in yours.

Feel your body lying in bed. Straighten it out. Ask yourself, "Am I awake now? Do I know that the gift of a new day is being given to me? Will I be awake for it? What will happen today? Right now I don't really know. Even as I think about what I have to do, can I be open to this not-knowing? Can I see today as an adventure? Can I see right now as filled with possibilities?

When it´s bad I feel like I´ve been hit by an anvil, shattered like cartoon characters but without the instant recovery. That´s the deep pit where I feel all lost and alone. But when it´s good, it´s as if all my nerve endings are deliciously electrified; I´m on fire inside and swept off my feet by the passion and energy that washes over me. That´s the pinnacle where I am truly alive

Even if men and women in America spoke the same language, they would still live by much different standards. For example, if a man in a movie researches a woman’s schedule, finds out where she lives and works, even goes to her work uninvited, it shows his commitment, proves his love. When Robert Redford does this to Demi Moore in Indecent Proposal, it’s adorable. But when she shows up at his work unannounced, interrupting a business lunch, it’s alarming and disruptive. If a man in the movies wants a sexual encounter or applies persistence, he’s a regular everyday guy, but if a woman does the same thing, she’s a maniac or a killer. Just recall Fatal Attraction, King of Comedy, Single White Female, Play Misty for Me, Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Basic Instinct.

It is the everyday moments that are most important to savor because they are the most common. If you hold your breath to savor only the off-the-charts amazing moments that happen in life, you’ll spend most of your life waiting on those moments to arrive. If instead you open your eyes to the miracle and gift of each moment, happiness is bound to follow you all the days of your life. So

The mind would rather fret about the future or pine over the past — so the mind can cling to its own illusion of control. But the current moment? It cannot be controlled. And what a mind can’t control, it tends to discount. Brush past ... over. It’s the battle plan of the enemy of the soul — to keep us blind to this current moment, the one we can’t control, to keep us blind to Him, the One who controls everything.

Isn’t that what Paul is saying? When, in light of everything, we don’t turn to God in thanks, God gives in to what we want — and turns us over to the dark … Turn in thanks and everything turns — and God doesn’t turn away. And there is this: If all the dismembering wickedness in the world begins with an act of forgetting — then the act of literally counting blessings literally re-members us to God. This is the making whole.

Are stress and worry evidences of a soul too lazy, too undisciplined, to keep gaze fixed on God? To stay in love? I don’t like to ask these questions, sweep out these corners where eyes glare from shadows. Stress brings no joy. Isn’t joy worth the effort of trust? “This is the work (service) that God asks of you: that you believe in the One Whom He has sent [that you cleave to, trust, rely on, and have faith in His Messenger].

How should we respond when we find the Word perplexing or dry or boring or unappealing? We keep eating. We receive nourishment. We keep listening and learning and taking our daily bread. We wait on God to give us what we need to sustain us one more day. We acknowledge that there is far more wonder in this life of worship than we yet have eyes to see or stomachs to digest. We receive what has been set before us today as a gift.

And soon a cold realization hit me: The time for giving up hope and 
letting go was now. It would be my parting gift to her. And as I cried 
into Mom’s ear and held her hand, and told her it was okay to let go, that I’d be fine, I felt her chest rise one last time. There was no long 
continuous beep like you see in the movies. Just a deafening silence 
and my echo of good-bye skipping down the side of her ear like a coin 
down a deep well.

There are indeed moments of spiritual ecstasy in the Christian life and in gathered worship. Powerful spiritual experiences, when they come, are a gift. But that cannot be the point of Christian spirituality, any more than the unforgettable pappardelle pasta dish I ate years ago in Boston's North End is the point of eating. Word and sacrament sustain my life, and yet they often do not seem life changing. Quietly, even forgettably, they feed me.

As I have already noted, even if psychics, astrologers, or other oracles are truly gifted, intuition is at best a do-it-yourself project. Other people's perspectives can be helpful at times, but ultimately the sixth gateway is about trusting your own inner guidance, doing your own readings, rather than searching for wisdom outside yourself. The goal is to take responsibility for guiding your own life and trusting your own intuitive capacities to do so.

Above all else, I want you to know that you are loved and lovable. You will learn this from my words and actions--the lessons on love are in how I treat you and how I treat myself. I want you to engage with the world from a place of worthiness. You will learn that you are worthy of love, belonging, and joy every time you see me practice self-compassion and embrace my own imperfections. We will practice courage in our family by showing up, letting ourselves be seen, and honoring vulnerability. We will share our stories of struggle and strength. There will always be room in our home for both. We will teach you compassion by practicing compassion with ourselves first; then with each other. We will set and respect boundaries; we will honor hard work, hope, and perseverance. Rest and play will be family values, as well as family practices. You will learn accountability and respect by watching me make mistakes and make amends, and by watching how I ask for what I need and talk about how I feel. I want you to know joy, so together we will practice gratitude. I want you to feel joy, so together we will learn how to be vulnerable. When uncertainty and scarcity visit, you will be able to draw from the spirit that is a part of our everyday life. Together we will cry and face fear and grief. I will want to take away your pain, but instead I will sit with you and teach you how to feel it. We will laugh and sing and dance and create. We will always have permission to be ourselves with each other. No matter what, you will always belong here. As you begin your Wholehearted journey, the greatest gift that I can give to you is to live and love with my whole heart and to dare greatly. I will not teach or love or show you anything perfectly, but I will let you see me, and I will always hold sacred the gift of seeing you. Truly, deeply, seeing you.

Thy gifts to us mortals fulfil all our needs and yet run back to thee undiminished. The river has its everyday work to do and hastens through fields and hamlets; yet its incessant stream winds towards the washing of thy feet. The flower sweetens the air with its perfume; yet its last service is to offer itself to thee. Thy worship does not impoverish the world. From the words of the poet men take what meanings please them; yet their last meaning points to thee.

I think you have a great women's ministry when the women of your community fall wildly in love with Jesus. Church ladies like this are the overflow of women who are empowered to lead, to challenge, to seek justice and love mercy, to follow Jesus to the ends of the earth like our church mothers and fathers of the past. You have a great women's ministry when there is room for everyone. You have a great women's ministry when you have detoxed from the world's views and unattainable standards for women and begun to celebrate the everyday women of valor, sitting next to you, and when you encourage, affirm, and welcome the diversity of women—their lives, their voices, their experiences—to the community. You have a great women's ministry when your women are ministering—to the world, to the church, to one another—pouring out freely the grace they have received, however God has gifted them, including cooking and crafts, strategy and leadership.

Heidegger spoke of two modes of existence: the everyday mode and the ontological mode. In the everyday mode we are consumed with and distracted by material surroundings—we are filled with wonderment about how things are in the world. In the ontological mode we are focused on being per se—that is, we are filled with wonderment that things are in the world. When we exist in the ontological mode—the realm beyond everyday concerns—we are in a state of particular readiness for personal change.

we elevate what we deem beautiful, endeavor to create spheres of pristine beauty, and perhaps rightly so, for “whatever is good, pure, lovely, think on these things.” But I wonder if maybe in the upside-down kingdom of God, what we regard as unlovely is, in Jesus, lovely. Because somewhere, underneath the grime of this broken world, everything has the radiant fingerprints of God on it. Seeing the world with Jesus’ eyes, we have the astonishing opportunity to daily love the unlovely into loveliness.

Useful friendships are the bread and butter of life. This is one reason why marriages that are not useful don’t last. Romantic feelings come and go. In useful marriages the parties depend on each other for the basics—the dull-normal stuff of everyday existence. This is true when it comes to children too. Children serve no useful purpose any more. We look at a child and say, “So long as he’s happy, that’s all that matters”—not accounting for usefulness in our account of happiness. Perhaps this is one reason that our children disappoint us—we expect them to pursue their passions, to develop their gifts, yada, yada, yada, but we don’t give them anything worth caring about. And so they shrug and they say, “Who cares?” And why should they care? And why should we be disappointed when they don’t amount to anything? We preached to them the gospel of happiness, implying, without meaning to, that they have nothing worthwhile to contribute to either a household, or the world at large. So they end up worthless and miserable.

When I deeply see: • bedsheets painted with highlighter? … children live here! • dead rose left too long in vase? … lingering memories of a brother’s gift. • Great-grandma’s wicker laundry basket overflowing in the mudroom? … we had a full, rich weekend! • vehicle souvenirs — a collection of shoes, Sunday school paper, Lego pieces? … we’ll gather them up too. • study table spread out with thoughts and ideas? … we’re thinking now. • a pile of tossed shoes on a shelf in the garage? … worn days of a good summer. • stack of tattered books? … stories that have become real.

Loving this Life These poems are my testimony and within these pages you’ll find a process of searching, feeling, growing, and learning I have seen the beauty in this life and the goodness of God I have felt great joy in little moments and everyday miracles I have grown in all times where I choose to overcome and be the sunshine I will make the place I’m in a place of light I have learned that all battles and victories are not my own and I want everyone else to know that what we’ve been chosen for is a gift We only get a few moments in this life We must live and love them well

God loves each of His children so deeply and wants them to know Him. His desire for them is to find peace and to come home to Him when He calls. It is wonderful to watch the lengths to which He will go to make that happen. He gives us ample time and uses the everyday gifts we have had all our lives to help us find Him. Mary Anne was gifted with great curiosity and determination, which she had used in her successful business life. God enabled her to use those very same gifts in searching for and finding Him. What an awesome and loving God we have at our disposal all the days of our lives.

The existential psychotherapy approach posits that the inner conflict bedeviling us issues not only from our struggle with suppressed instinctual strivings or internalized significant adults or shards of forgotten traumatic memories, but also from our confrontation with the “givens” of existence. And what are these “givens” of existence? If we permit our-selves to screen out or “bracket” the everyday concerns of life and reflect deeply upon our situation in the world, we inevitably arrive at the deep structures of existence (the “ultimate concerns,” to use theologian Paul Tillich’s term).

How had Lincoln been able to lead these inordinately prideful, ambitious, quarrelsome, jealous, supremely gifted men to support a fundamental shift in the purpose of the war? The best answer can be found in what we identify today as Lincoln’s emotional intelligence: his empathy, humility, consistency, self-awareness, self-discipline, and generosity of spirit. “So long as I have been here,” Lincoln maintained, “I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man’s bosom.” In his everyday interactions with the team, there was no room for mean-spirited behavior, for grudges or personal resentments.

Habits shape our desires. I desired ramen noodles more than good, nourishing food because, over time, I had taught myself to crave certain things and not others. In the same way I am either formed by the practices of the church into a worshiper who can receive all of life as a gift, or I am formed, inevitably, as a mere consumer, even a consumer of spirituality. The contemporary church can, at times, market a kind of “ramen noodle” spirituality. Faith becomes a consumer product—it asks little of us, affirms our values, and promises to meet our needs, but in the end it’s just a quick fix that leaves us glutted and malnourished.

On the other hand, John is the perfect example of exaggerated Intensity, Complexity, and Drive. His high energy posed a threat to others when he dominated conversations, used words as weapons, and posed potentially embarrassing questions. John was as raw and overstimulated as they come, a provocateur who openly defied authority and ducked responsibility for his choices. In addition to the umbrella traits of Intensity, Complexity, and Drive, Ann, John, and other gifted adults have a penchant for what I call Complex Thinking as well as sensory and emotional sensitivity, deep empathy, excitability, perceptivity, and goal-oriented motivation.

Modern life favors work, social engagement, travel, and the development of a career over the needs of home. We're expected to override the complaints of the soul for stability and security, so that we can move without hindrance into an exciting and fulfilling future. We see homesickness as a childish malady, inappropriate in the mature adult, who needs to keep home in perspective and become increasingly independent. But the soul always complains when it has been slighted, and the emotional sicknesses associated with modern life show that the spirit of home has been violated. Aimlessness, boredom, and irresponsibility are common problems, and they may be traced back to a loss of home. All signs indicate that our society is suffering from profound homesickness. The soul's need for home has to do not only with shelter and a house, but with more subtle forms, like the feeling that one is living in the right place, being around people who offer a sense of belonging, doing work that is truly appropriate, feeling maternally protected and enlivened by the natural world, and belonging to a nation and a world community. These larger sources of home ask for our attention and commitment, but they also have gifts for the heart, and each one of them contribute to the enchantment of everyday existence.

If I believe, then I must let go and trust. Belief in God has to be more than mental assent, more than a clichéd exercise in cognition. What is saving belief if it isn’t the radical dare to wholly trust? Pisteuo is used more than two hundred times in the New Testament, most often translated as “belief.” But it changes everything when I read that pisteuo ultimately means “to put one’s faith in; to trust.” Belief is a verb, something that you do. Then the truth is that authentic, saving belief must be also? The very real, everyday action of trusting … Then a true saving faith is a faith that gives thanks, a faith that sees God, a faith that deeply trusts? How would eucharisteo help me trust?

Far too many of the existing programs for gifted children cater only to high achievers who fit the conventional model of education. Those with high potential who cannot redesign themselves to walk the fine line of the traditional educational system’s requirements are at a loss. As one might imagine, an ill-conceived education can easily destroy self-esteem and motivation in any student, gifted or otherwise, though the gifted person most often blames him- or herself to a greater degree for a perceived failure to measure up. In every case of lack of attention and resources, the budding Everyday Genius is left holding the bag, a bag full of holes that drains away the likelihood of self-fulfillment and success.

When I kick back in mental meandering I'm taking a break; the outside world and my inside agitation don't get to me. I can get lost in my own thoughts. I suppose sometimes that means I seem aloof or rude. And I know I need to watch out for that. But the truth is that I need that source of satisfaction, or at least something like it. Ten minutes in the park gazing at the ripples in the pond are worth their weight in gold. My fantasies ad fascination with the little things make the humdrum parts of life richer, and more exciting, more touchable. ItMs my built-in well of serenity, standing back from the details of everyday life to regain my sense of balance, to reconnect with the steady frequency of life itself.

We often fail to consider accurate information that could potentially provide insight into another person's point of view (such as his or her facial expressions) but happily consider inaccurate information (such s broad stereotypes or gossip). For example, when evaluating preferences of people we perceive as similar to us, we tend to use ourselves as reference points. But when we perceive others as less similar, we are more likely to resort to stereotypes to assess their preferences. Once we consider how this dynamic might play out in gift-giving scenarios, it becomes clear why Grandpa ended up with twenty-three pairs of woolen socks for Christmas but without the Kindle he'd been hinting at since Thanksgiving.

My wet fingers dipped in the baptismal font remind me that everything I do in the liturgy—all the confessing and singing, kneeling and peace passing, distraction, boredom, ecstasy, devotion—is a response to God’s work and God’s initiation. And before we begin the liturgies of our day—the cooking, sitting in traffic, emailing, accomplishing, working, resting—we begin beloved. My works and worship don’t earn a thing. Instead, they flow from God’s love, gift, and work on my behalf. I am not primarily defined by my abilities or marital status or how I vote or my successes or failures or fame or obscurity, but as one who is sealed in the Holy Spirit, hidden in Christ, and beloved by the Father. My naked self is one who is baptized.

You will not always be joyous every moment of everyday, but you will never again feel the pit as quite so dark, quite so helpless, for you have identified who you are and you have found your hearts. That is a great gift both for you and the world. Be patient with your hearts. Be patient with yourselves. It will not always be a sunny day, but it can always be a beautiful day. And you can always find the beauty in a day even if it is in the 24th hour. Remember that. Remember your connection. You have this connection now. Use it. It is your access. Why would you deny yourself this? Simply open your heart and ask for help if you are feeling lonely or in struggle. Open your heart and ask for love to enter it and it will. It truly will.

But trees have their own personalities, and if we would be their friends, we must meet them on their own terms. No matter where I live, I always try to make friends with a tree. I find them so much like us in so many ways. They have their feet on the ground, their heads in the sky. They respond to the movements of the wind, the changes of the season. They have moods, aridities, joys. They like company. In their scale they are perhaps our most intimate companions: their lives are understandable in years, not aeons; their size in feet, not miles. We can watch them grow, give forth their fruit, send forth their young. We can touch them without feeling alien, or as if we are violating their wildness. We sense their private courage. And they have so much to teach. Like us, their roots are unseen, and no matter how glorious the front they put up for the world, their true strength lies in the hard work that takes place unnoticed beneath the surface. They have good years and bad years, and yet they endure. They know how to withstand all seasons, to be patient with adversity, to store up strength for the hard times. They are nourished by the land. When the wind blows, they understand the power of the unseen, and bow their heads before it. They hold on to their children as long as they must, then let them go where they will. And they have about them a deep compassion. They provide rest for the traveler, food for the hungry. They will even give up their own lives to provide shelter and warmth for others. They welcome weaker creatures without asserting their power. It

Contentment is not something I’ve known much in my life and not something I ever really knew I wanted. This, too, is the body’s grace—a gift of physiology, right there alongside my fading hair and skin. At younger ages, our brains are tuned to learn by novelty. At this stage in life, they incline to greater satisfaction in what is routine. Slowing down is accompanied by space for noticing. I am embodied with an awareness that eluded me when my skin was so much more glowy. I become attentive to beauty in ordinary, everyday aspects of my life. There is nothing more delicious than my first cup of tea in the morning; no experience more pleasurable than when my son, now much taller than me, wraps me in a hug; no view I find more breathtaking, over and over again, than the white pine that stands day in and day out behind my backyard.

For the next week, every day, listen to the words of your friends or colleagues. Try to hear what others communicate as a need or want. Your goal is to begin to give to others out of things that you already have in your possession. They may just need to borrow something, or you may choose to give them a gift with no strings attached. Listen to statements like this: “I really need _______.” “I could really use a _______.” “I have been wanting to get ______.” Try to think about everyday things in your home that you could give to make a friend’s life easier and your life simpler. Match something you have in your possession with a need of a friend. No strings attached. Just let it go. Give it away. Be generous. Give something larger than usual. You will be amazed how others will respond positively and with surprise. Get a taste of what it feels like to give out of your excess this week.

One of the greatest myths is that it’s hard to know how to lead a contented life. It’s actually quite straightforward, and the heart will take us there every time: Love. Serve. Explore your sense of purpose until you find a way to offer your gifts to others. Let the practice of compassion bring you peace. If we can love and serve others and ourselves against the backdrop of inner alchemy and the discernment it’s instilled in us, the doors of the Great Work will open for us. We can have the spiritual experiences we yearn for, and the wild moments that make our hearts sing, while leaving the world better off for those who come after us. Through acts of love and service, we continue aligning our levels of being and allowing our vibration to rise. Then one day we experience it: the bliss of the present moment and the undimming effulgence of a wide-open heart. There’s nothing like it, and it never gets old. If someone asks us how we got there, we can say, “There is this thing called ‘the Little Work.’ It’s a path as old as time, and it’s available to anyone who dares to take it on. How much do you want to be free?

I Never Told You You can fill a book with everything I never said Or the lines of a poem Or an Empty pool Or an empty bedroom, the candles all blown out I never told you how the reflection of myself in your eyes Was the only mirror I could bear to look at Or how I fought every day To transfuse the girl I saw there with the girl I am I tried to breathe in the words you made me: beautiful good brave I tried to be them for you even though they were weighted with impossibility I never told you how I always feared the rough edges of myself were too sharp for you and how I fought everyday to blunt them To bring down the walls To let you in without cutting you because I could never bear to hurt you like the others did Every day a fierce pride roared in me I was so lucky to know the truth I was the beneficiary of your radiance I basked in it and felt special And if not for the pain of your solitude I would have been content to be the only one I never told you How your touch made me feel like laughing and crying and singing all at once How your hand passing over my skin where atrocities Had not yet sloughed off, Skin cells remembering the worst touches Was like a tide washing over the ruddy sand And leaving it whole and smooth You made my skin forget Gave me new memories New sensations that didn't drag the shadows from the past In your arms I could start again, Start over. There is no greater gift in all the world Than you to the wreckage that is me... I never told you How I longed to kiss away your every bruise until there was no evidence No ghosts of your own suffering To put your pieces back together Seal the cracks Vanish them like they never were And never, ever Leave a scar I never told you I would take your pain if I could I would drink it down And take my comfort In making you ache a little less For a little while Did I? I'll never know because I never told you that I loved you I love you I love you It's too lat to say it now The time has passed for words How pathetic and small and weak On the phone Or on a piece of paper Starving Without the force of my own vitality My voice My breath My blood singing n my veins for you To give them power They are lost I love you It's too late but I love you And I'm sorry I never told you.

As the days shorten, I begin to feel the clutch of anxiety and not understand why. It takes time before i can consciously connect the slow dying of the sun to the despair that blooms in the dark. Unsettled, I too often seek solace in frenetic distraction, pressing my gaze to text messages or emails or the ceaseless minutiae of social media. AS if the illusion of action could banish the specter of sunless gloom. But rather than shirk the abyss, what if we scoped its depths? What if we stared darkness in the face and saw, at that pure ridge, the truth of our essential finity? Like the begonias and the fallen leaves of wintertime, we will die. We will die. We will die. Someday. Though painful to receive this knowledge is a gift. Embracing the reality of death sparks life. In winter’s existential chill, we can feel, as MacLaughlin writes, “The temporary heat of our aliveness burning at its hottest.” The heat is only temporary. Yes, we will die. But today we live. Now—in this flash of precious, precious time—we live. We live. We live. Now. In the face of inevitable death—the hollowed stalks, the still, still mornings, the green gone gray— we can acknowledge the life sparking in our bones. Heartbeats and breath unbidden, synapses sparking in a rhythm beyond our powers of control. In short, utter grace. “A Long and Chilly Vigil: On Winter,” pg. 146

SHOUT FOR JOY Shout triumphantly to the Lord, all the earth. Serve the Lord with gladness; come before Him with joyful songs. Psalm 100:1-2 HCSB The 100th Psalm reminds us that the entire earth should “Shout for joy to the Lord.” As God’s children, we are blessed beyond measure, but sometimes, as busy women living in a demanding world, we are slow to count our gifts and even slower to give thanks to the Giver. Our blessings include life and health, family and friends, freedom and possessions—for starters. And, the gifts we receive from God are multiplied when we share them. May we always give thanks to God for His blessings, and may we always demonstrate our gratitude by sharing our gifts with others. The 118th Psalm reminds us that, “This is the day which the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it” (v. 24, NASB). May we celebrate this day and the One who created it. If you can forgive the person you were, accept the person you are, and believe in the person you will become, you are headed for joy. So celebrate your life. Barbara Johnson God knows everything. He can manage everything, and He loves us. Surely this is enough for a fullness of joy that is beyond words. Hannah Whitall Smith A TIMELY TIP Every day should be a cause for celebration. By celebrating the gift of life, you protect your heart from the dangers of pessimism, regret, hopelessness, and bitterness.

I have a good friend, let’s call him Slim Berriss, who’s devised a schedule for himself that combines practical microdosing and pre-planned 1- to 2-day treks into deeper territory. For him, this blend provides a structured approach for increasing everyday well-being, developing empathy, and intensively exploring the “other.” Here is what it looks like: Microdosing of ibogaine hydrochloride twice weekly, on Mondays and Fridays. The dosage is 4 mg, or roughly 1/200 or less of the full ceremonial dosage at Slim’s bodyweight of 80 kg. He dislikes LSD and finds psilocybin in mushrooms hard to dose accurately. Woe unto he who “microdoses” and gets hit like a freight train while checking in luggage at an airport (poor Slim). The encapsulated ibogaine was gifted to him to solve this problem. Moderate dosing of psilocybin (2.2 to 3.5 g), as ground mushrooms in chocolate, once every 6 to 8 weeks. His highly individual experience falls somewhere in the 150 to 200 mcg description of LSD by Jim later in this piece. Slim is supervised by an experienced sitter. Higher-dose ayahuasca once every 3 to 6 months for 2 consecutive nights. The effects could be compared (though very different experiences) to 500+ mcg of LSD. Slim is supervised by 1 to 2 experienced sitters in a close-knit group of 4 to 6 people maximum. NOTE: In the 4 weeks prior to these sessions, he does not consume any ibogaine or psilocybin.

The undiscerning observer may think that this mixture of ideal and reality, of the human and spiritual, is most likely to be present where there are a number of levels in the structure of a community, as in marriage, the family, friendship, where the human element as such already assumes a central importance in the community’s coming into being at all, and where the spiritual is only something added to the physical and intellectual. According to this view, it is only in these relationships that there is a danger of confusing and mixing the two spheres, whereas there can be no such danger in a purely spiritual fellowship. This idea, however, is a great delusion. According to all experience the truth is just the opposite. A marriage, a family, a friendship is quite conscious of the limitations of its community-building power; such relationships know very well, if they are sound, where the human element stops and the spiritual begins. They know the difference between physical-intellectual and spiritual community. On the contrary, when a community of a purely spiritual kind is established, it always encounters the danger that everything human will be carried into and intermixed with this fellowship. A purely spiritual relationship is not only dangerous but also an altogether abnormal thing. When physical and family relationships or ordinary associations, that is, those arising from everyday life with all its claims upon people who are working together, are not projected into the spiritual community, then we must be especially careful. That is why, as experience has shown, it is precisely in retreats of short duration that the human element develops most easily. Nothing is easier than to stimulate the glow of fellowship in a few days of life together, but nothing is more fatal to the sound, sober, brotherly fellowship of everyday life. There is probably no Christian to whom God has not given the uplifting experience of genuine Christian community at least once in his life. But in this world such experiences can be no more than a gracious extra beyond the daily bread of Christian community life. We have no claim upon such experiences, and we do not live with other Christians for the sake of acquiring them. It is not the experience of Christian brotherhood, but solid and certain faith in brotherhood that holds us together. That God has acted and wants to act upon us all, this we see in faith as God’s greatest gift, this makes us glad and happy, but it also makes us ready to forego all such experiences when God at times does not grant them. We are bound together by faith, not by experience. ‘Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity’—this is the Scripture’s praise of life together under the Word. But now we can rightly interpret the words ‘in unity’ and say, ‘for brethren to dwell together through Christ’. For Jesus Christ alone is our unity. ‘He is our peace’. Through him alone do we have access to one another, joy in one another, and fellowship with one another.

It turned out there was something Marty did a little better. It all started with tuna casserole, or at least something RBG called tuna casserole. At Fort Sill one night, right after they were married, she dutifully presented the dish. That was her job, after all, or one of them. Marty squinted at the lumpy mass. “What is it?” And then he taught himself how to cook. The Escoffier cookbook had been a wedding gift from RBG’s cousin Richard. The legendary French chef had made his name at hotels like the Ritz in Paris and the Savoy in London. It was not exactly everyday fare for two young working parents on a military base in Oklahoma. But Marty found that his chemistry skills came in handy, and he began working his way through the book. Photograph by Mariana Cook made at the Ginsburgs’ home in 1998 Still, for years, the daily cooking was still RBG’s reluctant territory. Her repertoire involved thawing a frozen vegetable and some meat. “I had seven things I could make,” RBG said, “and when we got to number seven, we went back to number one.” Jane isn’t sure she saw a fresh vegetable until she was sent to France the summer she turned fourteen. Around that time, she decided, as RBG put it to me, “that Mommy should be phased out of the kitchen altogether.” RBG cooked her last meal in 1980. The division of labor in the family, Jane would say, developed into this: “Mommy does the thinking and Daddy does the cooking.” Growing up, James says, he got used to people asking him what his father did for a living, when his mother did something pretty interesting too.

Enjoyment requires discernment. It can be a gift to wrap up in a blanket and lose myself in a TV show but we can also amuse ourselves to death. My pleasure in wine or tea or exercise is good in itself but it can become disordered. As we learn to practice enjoyment we need to learn the craft of discernment: How to enjoy rightly, to have, to read pleasure well. There is a symbiotic relationship, cross-training, if you will, between the pleasures we find in gathered worship and those in my tea cup, or in a warm blanket, or the smell of bread baking. Lewis reminds us that one must walk before one can run. We will not be able to adore God on the highest occasions if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest. At best our faith and reason will tell us that He is adorable but we shall not have found Him so. These tiny moments of beauty in our day train us in the habits of adoration and discernment, and the pleasure and sensuousness of our gathered worship teach us to look for and receive these small moments in our days, together they train us in the art of noticing and reveling in our God’s goodness and artistry. A few weeks ago I was walking to work, standing on the corner of tire and auto parts store, waiting to cross the street when I suddenly heard church bells begin to ring, loud and long. I froze, riveted. They were beautiful. A moment of transcendence right in the middle of the grimy street, glory next to the discount tire and auto parts. Liturgical worship has been referred to sometimes derisively as smells and bells because of the sensuous ways Christians have historically worshipped: Smells, the sweet and pungent smell of incense, and bells, like the one I heard in neighborhood which rang out from a catholic church. At my church we ring bells during the practice of our eucharist. The acolyte, the person often a child, assisting the priest, rings chimes when our pastor prepares the communion meal. There is nothing magic about these chimes, nothing superstitious, they’re just bells. We ring them in the eucharist liturgy as a way of saying, “pay attention.” They’re an alarm to rouse the congregation to jostle us to attention, telling us to take note, sit up, and lean forward, and notice Christ in our midst. We need this kind of embodied beauty, smells and bells, in our gathered worship, and we need it in our ordinary day to remind us to take notice of Christ right where we are. Dostoevsky wrote that “beauty will save the world.” This might strike us as mere hyperbole but as our culture increasingly rejects the idea and language of truth, the churches role as the harbinger of beauty is a powerful witness to the God of all beauty. Czeslaw Milosz wrote in his poem, “One more day,” “Though the good is weak, beauty is very strong.” And when people cease to believe there is good and evil, only beauty will call to them and save them so that they still know how to say, “this is true and that is false.” Being curators of beauty, pleasure, and delight is therefore and intrinsic part of our mission, a mission that recognizes the reality that truth is beautiful. These moments of loveliness, good tea, bare trees, and soft shadows, or church bells, in my dimness, they jolt me to attention and remind me that Christ is in our midst. His song of truth, sung by His people all over the world, echos down my ordinary street, spilling even into my living room.

What is ADHD, anyway? For those still wondering what ADHD is, here’s the briefest summary I can muster: ADHD shows up in two areas of our brain function: working memory and executive functioning.[7] Working memory allows us to hold more than one thing in our brains at once. If you’ve ever run up the stairs, only to find yourself standing in your bedroom wondering what you came for, you’ve experienced a failure of working memory. Again, everyone experiences this from time to time. People with ADHD experience it nonstop, to the point where it impairs our ability to function normally. Working memory holds onto information until we’re able to use it.[8] In addition to forgetting why we opened the refrigerator, having a leaky working memory means we lose information before our brains can move it to long-term storage. We forget a lot of things before we have a chance to act on them or write them down. Our executive functions, on the other hand, give us the power to delay gratification, strategize, plan ahead, and identify and respond to others’ feelings.[9] That’s some list, isn’t it? In the same way a diabetic’s body cannot effectively regulate insulin, imagine your brain being unable to control these behaviors. This explains why ADHDers’ behavior so often defies norms and expectations for their age group — and this persists throughout their lifespan, not just grade school. ADHD isn’t a gift. It isn’t a sign of creativity or intelligence, nor is it a simple character flaw. And it’s more than eccentric distractibility, forgetfulness, and impulsivity. ADHD is a far-reaching disorder that touches every aspect of our lives. If we leave it unchecked, it will generate chaos at home, at work, and everywhere in between.

In my life and work, I’ve seen the darkest parts of the human soul. (At least I hope they are the darkest.) That has helped me see more clearly the brightness of the human spirit. Feeling the sting of violence myself has helped me feel more keenly the hand of human kindness. Given the frenzy and the power of the various violence industries, the fact that most Americans live without being violent is a sign of something wonderful in us. In resisting both the darker sides of our species and the darker sides of our heritage, it is everyday Americans, not the icons of big-screen vengeance, who are the real heroes. Abraham Lincoln referred to the “Better angels of our nature,” and they must surely exist, for most of us make it through every day with decency and cooperation. Having spent years preparing for the worst, I have finally arrived at this wisdom: Though the world is a dangerous place, it is also a safe place. You and I have survived some extraordinary risks, particularly given that every day we move in, around, and through powerful machines that could kill us without missing a cylinder: jet airplanes, subways, busses, escalators, elevators, motorcycles, cars—conveyances that carry a few of us to injury but most of us to the destinations we have in mind. We are surrounded by toxic chemicals, and our homes are hooked up to explosive gasses and lethal currents of electricity. Most frightening of all, we live among armed and often angry countrymen. Taken together, these things make every day a high-stakes obstacle course our ancestors would shudder at, but the fact is we are usually delivered through it. Still, rather than be amazed at the wonder of it all, millions of people are actually looking for things to worry about. Near the end of his life, Mark Twain wisely said, “I have had a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

We all know the elementary form of politeness, that of the empty symbolic gesture, a gesture-an offer-which is meant to be rejected. In John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, after the little boy Owen accidentally kills John's-his best friend's, the narrator's-mother, he is, of course, terribly upset, so, to show how sorry he is, he discreetly delivers to John a gift of the complete collection of color photos of baseball stars, his most precious possession; however, Dan, John's delicate stepfather, tells him that the proper thing to do is to return the gift. What we have here is symbolic exchange at its purest: a gesture made to be rejected; the point, the "magic" of symbolic exchange, is that, although at the end we are where we were at the beginning, the overall result of the operation is not zero but a distinct gain for both parties, the pact of solidarity. And is not something similar part of our everyday mores? When, after being engaged in a fierce competition for a job promotion with my closest friend, I win, the proper thing to do is to offer to withdraw, so that he will get the promotion, and the proper thing for him to do is to reject my offer-in this way, perhaps, our friendship can be saved.... Milly's offer is the very opposite of such an elementary gesture of politeness: although it also is an offer that is meant to be rejected, what makes hers different from the symbolic empty offer is the cruel alternative it imposes on its addressee: I offer you wealth as the supreme proof of my saintly kindness, but if you accept my offer, you will be marked by an indelible stain of guilt and moral corruption; if you do the right thing and reject it, however, you will also not be simply righteous-your very rejection will function as a retroactive admission of your guilt, so whatever Kate and Densher do, the very choice Milly's bequest confronts them with makes them guilty.

Not every time Self Love means pampering your wants, sometimes it just means to pat yourself while knowing you did the right thing by choosing the path of Patience. Sometimes it's just waking up in the morning and telling yourself, you've got this. Sometimes it is as simple as a cup of coffee or a hot shower after a really tiresome day. Sometimes it's just watching the day pass by, while you take time to assimilate your thoughts and let your mind detangle in the simplicity of literally not doing anything. Sometimes it's the urge to find a reason and purpose to carry on, to feel alive, to live. Sometimes it's watching the sunset paint in a beautiful horizon and sometimes it's just keeping awake just to catch a glimpse of the rising Sun. Sometimes it's getting drenched in the rain or simply madly crazily dancing in the rain not caring of what or who passes by. Because who knows how long you got this dance of Life. Sometimes it's pulling yourself up and letting your heart know all that happens has a reason and you don't have to know all of it. Really you don't have to have all the answers, trusting the Universe is always the Only answer. Sometimes it's just reminding yourself that you can't change the past but value what your past has taught you, that you can't write your future entirely because circumstances always play a part but you can work through your present, you can live and make your present a gift, a present that your future would feel good about. Sometimes it's just knowing that disciplining Life is never easy but that always finds the lasting smile in the end. Sometimes it's just holding on with all your Soul to know that you have done your bit, to know that somewhere someday everything will make sense. Sometimes it's just to know that goals aren't always about achieving something but to be some more of yourself by truly loving yourself, a little bit more each passing day. Love & Light, always - Debatrayee

If miracles are to be common, everyday occurances, normal and not extraordinary, they cease to attract attention, and lose their very reason of existence. What is normal is according to law. If miracles are the law of the Christian life they cease to serve their chief end. The contention of the faith-healers overlooks numerous important Biblical facts. Primarily the fact that the miraculous gifts in the New Testament were the credentials of the apostles, and were confirmed to those to whom the apostles had conveyed them--whence a presumption arises against their continuance after the apostolic age. ... Paul did not share the views of our modern faith-healers.

Mad is an everyday, ordinary word. It is compact. It fits into songs. As the old Hindi film song has it, M-A-D, mad mane paagal. It can become a phrase-'Maddaw-what?' which began life as 'Are you mad or what?'. It can be everything you choose it to be: a mad whirl, a mad idea, a mad March day, a mad heiress, a mad mad mad mad world, a mad passion, a mad hatter, a mad dog. But it is different when you have a mad mother. Then the word wakes up from time to time and blinks at you, eyes of fire. But only sometimes, for we used the word casually ourselves, children of a mad mother. There is no automatic gift that arises out of such a circumstance. If sensitivity or gentleness came with such a genetic load, there would be no old people in mental homes.

If New York bestows the gift of loneliness, Squirrel Hill wards against it. Intrusion and concern are its gifts. To live here requires participation, whether you like it or not. New Yorkers are created everyday. We require a lifetime.

In everyday life we know that someone who is a true lover is very different from someone who is a pretender or a playboy. We know that true love should not be motivated at all by self- interest. And such is God’s love for us. It is a love that seeks the very best for us; it is sacrificial; it never stops giving. Perhaps the closest we can come to understanding the essence and quality of God’s love for us—though it is still a faint reflection of the reality—is the way in which we love our children. We bring these helpless, fragile little things home from the hospital and we love them. They have not done anything to deserve our love, indeed they are totally incapable of doing anything for us, yet we love them. From the moment we become a parent we know that from now on, life will pretty much revolve around our child and often they will inconvenience us in ways we can only dream of! Yet, we never stop loving them—really loving them. Parents and their children are a model to help us understand the way in which our Heavenly Father God really loves each one of us. As we think about how unconditionally we love our children and begin to grasp how complete and unconditional the Father’s love for us is, we can begin to scratch the surface of His grace and understand a little of the motivation behind God’s unmerited offer of salvation and forgiveness for our sins. Despite a lot of good teaching on the subject in the Church over the years, many Christians are still mystified by grace. They fail to live in the richness of it themselves and they fail to show grace to others. Many are still trapped by a performance-based theology that thinks God’s love must be earned or deserved. They think that if they behave well and perform good works for God then He will love them more. This is so far from the truth! God cannot love us any more nor any less than He does now, and He longs for us to live in the place of grace where we understand that He gives His love to us freely. God’s love and grace are gifts for us to receive. Do we ever deserve them? No! We are totally undeserving, but we are the undeserving who are the apple of His eye. GRACE AND FORGIVENESS The title of this book Grace and Forgiveness is purposefully chosen because the issue of God’s grace is vitally intertwined with the issue of forgiveness. They are not simply two distinct aspects of our spiritual life that we have decided to place together in the same book. When we come into a real understanding of the extent of God’s grace towards us and what that means, we begin to see how vital and necessary it is that we pass that grace and love on to others. Grace becomes an irresistible force in our lives. When properly understood, the “unfairness” and “injustice” of God’s grace towards us is deeply shocking, even offensive to our human understanding, as we will see. But in the same way that God lavishly and extravagantly pours His grace out upon our lives, He is calling us to learn how to show grace to others by forgiving those who truly don’t deserve it. The great discovery of forgiveness is that, through a selfless act, we open ourselves up to a greater outpouring of the blessing of God on our lives. There are two important things that every Christian needs to realize at some point in their journey as a believer, preferably sooner rather than later! The first is that our God is very big and very powerful and there is nothing that He cannot do. The second is that He is very loving and compassionate towards us. The Bible says that “God is love”. This is not a statement about what He does, but about who He is. He is the very embodiment of perfect, flawless love. His heart for us is to see us living our spiritual lives where we are operating with the dynamics of His Kingdom, just as Jesus did. It is a Kingdom of love, filled with faith, aware of the bigness of our God; aware of His willingness to interact with us and do things for us as we act in loving obedience to Him.

I want to suggest a pretty radical idea about what family is for. Family is about the forming of persons. Being a person is a gift, like life itself—we are born as human beings made in the image of God. But while in one sense a person is simply what we are as human beings, we are also able to become—to grow in capacities that are only potentially present within us at first. Family shapes us in countless ways.

we wake up and feel deserving when we should cry for the gift that's been given again starting at home base but the pitch shall appear when what we decide is but a chance for a home run but only a base hit will be much more than plenty everyday is more than promised, what we do, is again a gift levipaultaylor

In the everyday mode we are consumed with and distracted by material surroundings—we are filled with wonderment about how things are in the world. In the ontological mode we are focused on being per se—that is, we are filled with wonderment that things are in the world.

Best of all, the goldfinch came for a visit today to be a living example of the countless small gifts of beauty that surround us in this very moment. Maybe in noticing her presence—like noticing a smile, or a flower, or a kind word—we are reminded that joy is finding the holy in the small, and the sacred in the everyday.

In the realm of spiritual philosophy, where the sacred and the mundane converge, where the mystical dances with the ordinary, there exists an enchanting archetype that beckons us to explore the depths of our souls—the Divine Rabbit. This ethereal creature, a symbol of fertility, rebirth, and spiritual illumination, invites us to embark on a profound journey of self-discovery and transcendence. The Divine Rabbit, with its gentle countenance and nimble grace, embodies the essence of the divine feminine, representing the nurturing and creative aspects of existence. It is a messenger of the cosmic forces, whispering ancient wisdom and guiding us towards the realization of our true nature. With each hop, it traverses the sacred landscapes of our consciousness, leaving in its wake the seeds of transformation and spiritual awakening. This mystical creature, adorned with the symbols of abundance and growth, teaches us the profound truth that spirituality is not confined to lofty realms or esoteric knowledge, but is deeply rooted in the tapestry of our everyday lives. The Divine Rabbit invites us to cultivate a sense of presence and mindfulness, to embrace the magic of the present moment, and to recognize that every breath we take is an opportunity for divine communion. In the Divine Rabbit, we find a profound reflection of our own spiritual journey. Like the rabbit, we too navigate the maze of existence, encountering both obstacles and opportunities along the way. The Divine Rabbit reminds us to approach these challenges with grace, agility, and an unwavering trust in the divine plan. It teaches us that even in the face of adversity, we possess the innate resilience to overcome, to rise above our limitations, and to embrace the boundless potential that resides within us. The Divine Rabbit also serves as a catalyst for profound transformation and rebirth. Just as the rabbit sheds its old fur to make way for new growth, we too are called to release the layers of conditioning, limiting beliefs, and attachments that no longer serve our highest good. The Divine Rabbit encourages us to step into the fullness of our authentic selves, to embrace our innate gifts and talents, and to allow the light of our divine essence to illuminate the world around us. Moreover, the Divine Rabbit invites us to honor the interconnectedness of all beings and the sacredness of every living creature. It teaches us to tread lightly upon the Earth, recognizing that our actions have far-reaching consequences. The Divine Rabbit reminds us of the importance of compassion, kindness, and love towards all beings, for in their eyes, we catch a glimpse of the divine spark that resides within us all. As we embark on our spiritual journey, let us heed the wisdom of the Divine Rabbit. Let us cultivate a sense of wonder and curiosity, allowing ourselves to be guided by the synchronicities and signs that pepper our path. Let us embrace the cycles of life and honor the sacredness of both beginnings and endings. And above all, let us remember that within the heart of the Divine Rabbit resides the eternal flame of our own divine essence, waiting to be kindled and expressed in all its radiant glory. May we follow the path of the Divine Rabbit, awakening to the depths of our being, embracing our divine nature, and embodying the transformative power of love, compassion, and spiritual illumination. In doing so, we dance in harmony with the rhythm of the universe, honoring the sacredness of life, and fulfilling our highest purpose.

Life’s trials What does he live for? There are many reasons, Numberless beliefs, many impulses, that he could die for, His life’s mottos his life’s reasons, That he lives for and would easily die for, For he believes in them all, They bring him joy he always longed for, So, he strives not for himself but for these reasons all, Every night and every day, he toils through the life’s way, On barren patches where you need strong reasons to keep walking, Because sometimes when days are darker than the darkest nights, one may forget his way, Until he has a good reason to carry on anyway and believe in the day and in his walking, He often comes across moments with no richness of feelings, And in this feelingless landscape of life, he questions life’s harshness, And as he is overcome by life’s trials and their cussed feelings, He summons these reasons to deal with life and its harshness, He is a great inverter I suppose, Because he always invents a new reason to live, Everyday he is in this state of relentless strife, and about it I no more suppose, Because he has proven it, otherwise how could someone with a life that feels lifeless, so well live, He struggles, he falls, he waivers, he faces life’s repudiations, But he carries on, for he has a reason to believe in and someone’s love to live for, So, the villains of time and fate may have connived against him, along with life’s repudiations, But none of them matter, because he has a reason to live for and someone’s love to die for, How far will life go in his case and be villainous, Only life knows, and fate maybe, But his reasons of life and love of someone, enable him to deal with life’s moments villainous, He will live forever maybe, because when he dies life will be left all alone, without any reasons; maybe, And as long as he has reasons new everyday, To live and deal with whatever comes his way, Life shall envy him although it tries him in new ways everyday, But he toils everyday in his own unique way, This is what life seeks to know; how? Maybe he is built differently by providence that gifted him endless reasons to live, But the life is keen to know how, And the answer is simple: Through her memories and her love, he finds the fountain of reasons to deal with life and to live!

The Gift of Imagination Imagination is the best way for your life to come up with new ideas. Let go of the creativity. When considering what you want to do or have in your life, there is no chance. Since you were young, what did you want to do? Or, recently, what did you hear others do that you wish you could do? Are you interested in taking an adventure or relaxation break, even if not this year? Even if it seems like your wishes will take a miracle to pass, write the answers on a sheet of paper. Write down all the ideas that come up on another piece of paper, asking you that you can't have or do those things. Get your system's negative thoughts. Now, write down how you can literally make them happen on the back of the first page that has your wish list. Which action will you take? Write them down even if they seem unrealistic. Write that on the other piece of paper that has your negative thoughts on it when a negative thought comes up. Burn or throw away the negative thoughts at the end of this exercise and read the wish list again. Keep it in your routine scheduler or bag. Just let it fly with you all day long. If you have more time and energy to work with it, take it out again and start taking the steps. But let it hang out with you until then as you go about your everyday life. Eventually something magical could happen. Taking the time to encourage your creativity to flow freely makes you open up to your fantasies about what you want and need in your life. Every one of us wants time to rest, enjoy, and satisfaction. Let your imagination convince you what your heart wants. Recognize it, write it down, and nurture it.

Many of us lament the passing of the 'mom and pop' corner grocery store. When I was a child, on the east side of Detroit, we lived on a block with such a store on the corner, and the family nature of that business helped hold the neighborhood together. The woman who owned the store knew me, knew my parents, and gave us precious soul gifts of safety and understanding. Our society has suffered from the disappearance of family businesses and the spread of impersonal, massive, anonymously owned and operated supermarkets and other kinds of stores. These changes in social patterns suck the soul from everyday life, ounce by ounce, and we're not aware of the impact of the change until we see crime increase or the neighborhood become lifeless and decayed. Think back on any family business in your past, then think of the same service or shop that is now a chain operation. Somewhere in the differences you can detect a loss of enchantment.

Like, so many images of God, this one [Ps. 90 - our shelter from the stormy blast of time] is both true and limited. In Christian faith, God is immortal. God was before time, and God will outlast time. But God's immortality is not flexed as a command to human beings to fly away from time into something bitter. Nor is God a deus ex machina intent on plucking us out of everyday life and placing us in a realm of "nontime" somehow higher or better than what is available in the ordinariness of years, weeks, and days. Quite the contrary: it is within time itself that God meets us.

Giving is the way we also learn how to receive. The mutual practice of giving and receiving is an everyday ritual when we know true love. A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers -- the experience of knowing we always belong.

Cultivating a generous heart, which is, as Salzberg writes, “the primary quality of an awakened mind,” strengthens romantic bonds. Giving is the way we also learn how to receive. The mutual practice of giving and receiving is an everyday ritual when we know true love. A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers—the experience of knowing we always belong.

Validation should not be reserved for a special occasion. It should be an everyday thing. By so doing, you can build a strong sense of self-worth and self-esteem.

I think I learned the most about the value of ordinary from interviewing people who have experienced tremendous loss such as the loss of a child, violence, genocide, and trauma. The memories that they held most sacred were the ordinary, everyday moments.