Pat Schneider’s poem, "The Patience of Ordinary Things", made me pause the first time I read it. I needed to process and savor her words as the images ran through my mind. She helped me appreciate how much wisdom can be drawn from ordinary things, events, places, and even people. That is, of all that is present in our daily lives.
Poetry is mystical because it sees beyond appearance and it offers the opportunity to unveil the deeper mystery of things. A poem captures an instant and our lives are an accumulation of instants; our days are filled with them. Our attention and our openness to the revelation of things turn the ordinary into extraordinary events.
I practiced, for a while, capturing beauty with my phone’s camera and started posting on instagram. It was truly a spiritual practice that heightened my awareness to see what was beautiful around me, even if there were places I had not considered as such before. I am now shifting my practices to see the sacred everywhere.
There are places and spaces that we have already deemed sacred. Places that act like poems, capturing the instant of the Sacred to make it easily accessible to us: Places of worship and other sacred places that have received thousands of prayers and the devotions of many, mountains, valleys, beaches, and forests that evoke the presence of the Mystery of life and awaken a sense of awe in us, the instant we feel we have healed and a part of us has returned to us, the deep human connections we have with those we love and that love us.
But what if I invite this revelation to occur by simply holding the question “Where is the sacred here? Or "What is holy about this place?” Like an invitation to an even deeper awareness, allowing stillness and silence until all that is holy is revealed to us.
I invite you to wonder with me:
Where is the sacred in the communities you belong to?
Where is the sacred in your job, home, places you frequent?
Where is the sacred on your commute?
What is holy about the things you are witnessing or exploring?
The invitation is not to come up with answers, at least not logical or coherent answers as you would for a test or a symposium, but to experience the answer within you and to listen to the movement of sensations these questions may evoke. It is an invitation to explore the interactions between the world within and the world without. And to find, in the space between the two, your own poem emerging.
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