Aligning with Grace

I come into the river because I am cleared for all activities, having made a recovery nothing short of remarkable, barely a full month after surgery... I come into the river because I can and because I want to...The river calls me... I come into the river to align more deeply with grace... I don my "Aligning with Grace" cap, and haul Grace, my trusty kayak, that has seen me through depression and tremendous growth these last few years - navigating me through the rough waters of isolation and connection - steering me through waves of grief and death and subsequent rebirth - and together we launch into this river that has been a silent witness to it all... I come into this river much sooner than I ever could have imagined, with an incredible lightness of being and soul, and float in the stillness for a while. I drink in the silence, interrupted occasionally by a bass flapping as it happily jumps out of the water, and a blue heron flying over me, once more biddin...

I still bask in the wonder and the beauty of meditating during Maha Shivarati - "The Great Night of Shiva," when Shiva pauses to rest after his Cosmic Dance... I marvel at the gifts I have been given, the insight, the clarity, the bliss, and I think of Gunilla Norris ' simple prayer, "Jolt me into joy!" In the afternoon, I curl up with Gunilla Norris ' simple yet divine spiritual and poetic musings - Being Home: Discovering the Spiritual in the Everyday - and I am not only jolted into joy, but into Pure Awareness and the gifts of deep sight, intuitions and realizations. I think of a dear friend, who strives to offer ever moment and act to the Divine, and does so with both humility and grace, and I find it such a blessing, that this book falls into my hands, precisely at this time - it is such a simple testament meant for other souls in search of embodying the same experience... Yesterday, after my evening meditation, I realized that there truly cannot be an...

This entry, seems to very perfectly follow in the footsteps of yesterday's posting...In fact, I almost titled it, "Life as Practice, Practice as Life Part 2!" I finish the first phase of organizing my books, a feat that has consumed several weeks in stops and starts - many arms filled with them, and boxes carried down to the basement - others juggled and redistributed from one room to another, but now the organization and rearrangement is much more logical and methodical, and volumes will be easier to find. All my theology and spirituality books from many decades of teaching and study, occupy one wall - with one shelf for example, exclusively dedicated to my massive collection of Thomas Merton writings, and multiple offerings by other authors, now all gathered together. Everything now feels right... I find that I have two copes of Inviting Silence: Universal Principles of Meditation by Gunilla Norris , and though I have read this brief volume many times before, I curl u...