This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
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updated 11d ago
updated 11d ago
psychological wisdom explains, it is difficult to control the targets of our numbing.
For me, most simply, contemplative spirituality is a fidelity to beholding the divine in all things. In the field, on the walk home, sitting under the oak tree that hugs my house. A sacred attention.
meghna added 5mo ago
More than the grand beauties of our lives, wonder is about having the presence to pay attention to the commonplace. It could be said that to find beauty in the ordinary is a deeper exercise than climbing to the mountaintop.
meghna added 5mo ago
The tragedy is that as we distance ourselves from the delight of our youth, we become increasingly prone to disillusionment. Wonder and beauty are not precise cures for disillusionment, but they certainly can stave off the despair of it. To reclaim the awe of our child-selves, to allow ourselves to be taken by the beauty of a thing, allows goodness
... See moremeghna added 5mo ago
It is more remembrance than revelation, more maybes than certainty.
But even with the things I will become, I am called to them because on some deep plane of the soul, they are already true of me. I choose them out of a fidelity to self, not an aspiration toward an idealized self.
Some callings come to you only in memory. Some come only on the mouth of someone you trust. Some don’t need to be heard in order to be lived. And not all calls come from outside of you.
I believe fear has the holy potential to draw out awe in us. To lead us into deeper patterns of protection and trust. To mold us into people engaged in the unknown, capable of making mystery of it instead of terror.
Whenever I become uncertain of which direction liberation lies in, I ask myself to tell the truth. Not that I am capable of comprehending what any ultimate Truth is. But I am capable of at least telling the truth about what I believe to be true—my inmost convictions, desires, or even an embodied revelation. The truth that rattles in my bones.