Gleaning and Growing through Bits and Pieces

I keep a file on my computer for bits and pieces of interesting stuff I read, discover, and learn.  Each item stirred my soul enough to say “Hey, pay attention to me here. I have something for you to think about.”

But I have learned I just can’t glance at them and move them into the file. Soon they are forgotten and wasted. Periodically I take them back out and hold them gently in my hands and ask them to speak to my heart once again. Often I make notes in my journal.  Or like today decide to share them in a blog post.

Here are some bits and pieces for you to read, consider and listen to their wisdom:

“We often confuse reflection with rumination, but the two couldn’t be more different. Rumination keeps us circling the same thought, the same hurt, the same what-if, without ever arriving anywhere new. It feels like thinking, but it’s actually a loop – the mental equivalent of pacing the same five feet of floor. Reflection, on the other hand, moves. It asks a question, follows it somewhere, and arrives at an insight or a next step. The difference isn’t the subject matter – you can reflect on the exact same painful event you’ve been ruminating over – it’s whether you’re extracting meaning or just replaying pain. One way to tell the difference: rumination leaves you more anxious than when you started. Reflection leaves you calmer, even if the insight itself is uncomfortable.” Steve Lawson

“Devotion is a beautiful word because it holds love within it. We give ourselves to what we care about. A parent is devoted to a child. An artist is devoted to beauty. A gardener is devoted to the earth and the seasons. A friend is devoted to another’s well-being. Devotion brings our scattered attention to a place where it can truly rest.

The American mythologist Joseph Campbell once told journalist Bill Moyers that he didn’t believe people were searching so much for the meaning of life as for “an experience of being alive.”

Maybe the task before us in this unraveling age is not simply to preserve the institutions we inherited. Maybe it is to become inspirited again.

We need to find our way back to lives shaped by devotion instead of distraction, by relationships instead of extraction, by participation instead of consumption.

Don’t get so busy managing your life that you forget to actually live it.” Rev Cameron Trimble

“Vocation does not come from a voice ‘out there’ calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice ‘in here’ calling me to be the person I was born to be.” – Parker Palmer

“The issue in prayer is not to pray because we are certain, but to pray because we are uncertain.

“You pray in order to believe…Sometimes you can’t wait for your mind to catch up. Sometimes the heart has to take the initiative.… Even when I don’t, or can’t, believe, I still believe that it’s important to believe,” I heard myself saying. ‘That’s enough to keep me stammering my prayers.’”   Renita Weems

“What if there are moments in our lives that feel like interruptions but are actually invitations?

Invitations to slow down. Invitations to pay attention. Invitations to see something we would have otherwise missed.

Sometimes what feels like an interruption to our plans is actually part of what God is using to accomplish something we couldn’t see coming.

Sometimes the thing that interrupts our plans becomes the very thing God uses to redirect our perspective.

Maybe it isn’t an interruption after all.

Maybe it’s a hidden blessing waiting to be discovered.” Chris Russo

New fun word.  A whangdoodle is a fanciful creature of undefined nature. It is a creature whose appearance is left entirely to the imagination. Unlike a dragon or unicorn, there’s no standard shape or defining features baked into the word. Your whangdoodle might have feathers or flippers or 300 toes, and nobody could tell you otherwise.

“I knew someone who stopped using the word ‘but’. Everything was ‘and’. It cracked open the hard pericarp of my thinking, revealing a pithy inner chamber. It substituted phrases like, “It was hard, but I did it,” with an empowering reminder that one does not preclude the other. “It was hard. I did it.” A subtle but meaningful change. Not in spite of the difficulty, which certainty also feels true, but alongside the difficulty; with the difficulty.”  Katie in the Friends of Silence newsletter

“I have refused to live
locked in the orderly house of
     reasons and proofs.
The world I live in and believe in
is wider than that. And anyway,
     what’s wrong with Maybe?

You wouldn’t believe what once or
twice I have seen. I’ll just
     tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
     ever, possibly, see one.”  Mary Oliver

What a collection to reread. These words ground me. Open me up to wonder. To know we don’t live in isolation; that other humans understand life too.

What about you? What have you read lately that has touched your soul?