Beauty and Connection To The Divine

I fell in love with author, and Irish Catholic priest, John O'Donohue, many, many years ago. And when he talked about his home and the landscape of Ireland, I was right there with him. I still miss him...even though we never met. Just the thought that he's not on the Earth in the same way any longer to write more wonderful words...<sigh>

Now that I'm listening to the audio book, read in his own flowing Irish voice, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, I've fallen again. Oh so much. His visions and words make you fall in love with being here, with being alive as a human being full with the richness of our physical senses, all over again, too.

It contains the kind of solid wisdom that picks you up and throws you around and then plants you smack down again roughly with the Truth--with a capital "T"--of life. In a sparkly way. He helps me remember that what is real, first, is Spirit. The sacred, the divine is everywhere.
 

I'm going to devote a few blog entries around the wisdom in this book.
They say writing makes things more clear, more solid. The journaling I'm drawn to do the most is more about color and shape, texture, collage, paint, and some words thrown in around it all. And I'm sure I'll do a bit of that too because it is magic...and writing with words, that's just damn challenging and mysterious to me. Words are hard, because I think they are so precise, just so so precise, that in fact they are not precise at all.

So, let's go, here is the first piece..

"I suppose the tiniest distance in the world is the distance between you and your self. Yet it is the most vital, absolutely vital, distance. Because whatever goes on there determines who you think you are and the way that you shape your life. And the depth of who you are also depends on the depth of your ability to imagine yourself. Because in every life...there is something infinite going on...No person is a finished thing, or a frozen or paralyzed image. Each one of us is emerging all the time. And to be faithful to yourself is one of the most profound human duties. Truth to yourself is a life journey commitment."

Wow.

"your ability to imagine yourself"

Who you think you are shapes your life. This feels very true to me.

This has been written for thousands of years in many ways and in many different spiritual texts, and still when I hear it, there really is a space that it fills as if I haven't heard it before.

“The outer conditions of a person's life will always be found to be harmoniously related to his inner state...Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are."
-James Allen

And Proverbs 23:7...
"For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he"

Understanding Self (with a capital "S") and living from that truth shapes us, and it shapes our experience here.

Yep, magic.