What You Really Love

Today a friend emailed thisthis Rumi quote to me .

"Let yourself be silently drawn

by the strange pull of what you really love.

It will not lead you astray."

Suddenly hints of Spring came flooding into my imagination… grass greening, lilac branches plumping and more. And I remember so vividly how easily I move out of awareness and into unawareness as I walk through my days. And then I recall that some of my friends regularly choose to take their newly purchased calendar and reserve specific 36 hour-blocks-of-silent-time each month to spend at our monastery hermitage. This they do in pencil, so if absolutely necessary it can be shifted but never totally erased from that specific month. It’s their way of allowing time to let silent awareness have its due time in their word-filled lives.

Brother David Steindl-Rast would add a delightful practice to their hermitage “awareness time” for those who are interested. He suggests that there is a simple way to explore “seeing into the heart of things” and freeing wonder and gratitude to spontaneously arise.

Once, he invited retreatants to “Take a holy card with you tomorrow. Just a 3x5 card with a pin-hole punched in it. Then walk up to a fabric, the wings of a beetle, or even the underside of a plant or weed and look very carefully at it through the hole in your card. When you block out everything around you except a tiny, tiny space you are able to see things your never saw before in your life.”

Maybe that’s another way for me to rediscover the strange pull of what I really love, care about and am immensely grateful for. It may even leave room for the God-given way of seeing things to become visible in my life.