January 23-A, 2023

Peggy’s Cove Oil Paint Rendered — Nova Scotia
What practice do you follow
to maintain/recover your balance and harmony?

How do you sustain your focus?
Your direction?
Your connection to the central pole,
the axis mundi,
of the turning/heaving/crashing/chaotic world?

What brings you back to who you are--
to your original nature
and the innate virtues/traits/characteristics
that are yours from birth?

An abiding relationship with 
art,
music
and nature
is traditional with the species
for providing a restorative association
with the other side.

Reducing the amount of noise,
complexity
and drama,
and increasing the time spent with
emptiness,
stillness
and silence
will reestablish contact 
between the mover and the moved.

I look out the window.
Take photographs.
Write these monologues with the Muse.

We find our own way
to what works for us
in returning to the source
of balance and harmony,
spirit/vitality/vibrancy/life
and aligning ourselves
with the rhythm and flow
of time and place
in each situation as it arises--
which becomes our practice,
and the ground of our being.

–0–

Published by jimwdollar

I'm retired, and still finding my way--but now, I don't have to pretend that I know what I'm doing. I retired after 40.5 years as a minister in the Presbyterian Church USA, serving churches in Louisiana, Mississippi and North Carolina. I graduated from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, in Austin, Texas, and Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. My wife, Judy, and I have three daughters and five granddaughters within about twenty minutes from where we live--and are enjoying our retirement as much as we have ever enjoyed anything.

4 thoughts on “January 23-A, 2023

  1. To read me is to read who I read, and it is a great circle that encompasses us all–that “great cloud of witnesses,” all of whom know the same things, and are one with all others who know what they know, which is all of us, only some of us don’t know it yet. It is at once great and terrible, wonderful and sad/tragic beyond measure, not knowing what we all know…

    Liked by 1 person

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