WIld Autumn

The Holy Spirit is a friend who has "the key to the house" and can come and go just as you might expect a spirit to do - so whimsically endowed and "in whom we live and move and have our being."

As the autumn winds blow in this season of change, and we stand on the threshold of a Year of Faith, life is yet still full of contradictions.

Here are two pieces of music along with some reflections I have selected from John O'Donohue - imbued with spirit filled hope and a nice way to approach the new week.


"The ancient rhythms of the earth have insinuated themselves into the rhythms of the human heart. The earth is not outside us; it is within: the clay from where the tree of the body grows. 
When we emerge from our offices, rooms and houses, we enter our natural element. We are children of the earth: people to whom the outdoors is home. 

Nothing can separate us from the vigor and vibrancy of this inheritance. In contract to our frenetic, saturated lives, the earth offers a calming stillness. Movement and growth in nature takes its time. 

The patience of nature enjoys the ease of trust and hope. There is something in our clay nature that needs to continually experience this ancient, outer ease of the world. It helps us remember who we are and why we are here."
 
John O’Donohue


First up is Great Lake Swimmers with New Wild Everywhere.

"We live between the act of awakening and the act of surrender. Each morning we awaken to the light and the invitation to a new day in the world of time; each night we surrender to the dark to be taken to play in the world of dreams where time is no more.

At birth we were awakened and emerged to become visible in the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark and become invisible. 

Awakening and surrender: they frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty."

Excerpt from the book Beauty by John O’ Donohue

Vivaldi's music and images of Autumn 

"The human heart,” writes John O’Donohue in his essay, "To Retrieve the Lost Art of Blessing,” continues to dream of a state of wholeness, a place where everything comes together, where loss will be made good, where blindness will transform into vision, where damage will be made whole, where the clenched question will open in the house of surprise, where the travails of a life’s journey will enjoy a homecoming. To invoke a blessing is to call some of that wholeness upon a person now.”


 Blessing in the Chaos 

To all that is chaotic in you, let there come silence.
 Let there be a calming of the clamoring,

 a stilling of the voices
 that have laid their claim on you,  

 that have made their home in you, 
 that go with you even to the holy places 

 but will not let you rest, 

 will not let you hear your life with wholeness 
 or feel the grace that fashioned you. 

 Let what distracts you cease.
 Let what divides you cease. 

 Let there come an end to what diminishes and demeans, 
 and let depart all that keeps you in its cage.

 Let there be an opening into the quiet
 that lies beneath the chaos, 

where you find the peace you did not think possible
 and see what shimmers within the storm.