I've experienced nothing in my life any more helpful than getting into the habit of pausing--hitting a kind of reset key that refreshes body, mind and soul all together. What follows is a short re-do of an older post about what this is and how can work.
---
In the Wendell Berry poem below we can sense his deep sense of the sacredness of Life--something always available, always possible, always potentially sustaining:
What We Need Is Here
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
The poem also reminds us we don’t really have to go anywhere to get to a sacred place. 'What we need is here.' This doesn't necessarily mean we stop taking retreats and making pilgrimages--heaven forbid! It just means that life, in a strange and wonderful way, can be just as rich in our ordinary 'here' as in any extraordinary 'there'.
By cultivating a habit of a Sacred Pause, over time we prove to ourselves this is so. A Sacred Pause is not complicated. It can be as simple as breathing in and breathing out, letting go of whatever we’re doing, whatever we’re holding to, or gently slipping out of the grip of whatever has a hold on us so that we can slip into being ‘quiet in heart, and in eye, clear.’
When we stop our usual down-pat ways of 'doing’ life and start making room for ROOM--open, patient, playful, curious, kind--we get reoriented over and over to what matters most to us. If we cultivate these Sacred Pauses our experience of freshness and openness and possibility begins to happen consistently enough that we can't help but begin to trust the process. Practice builds trust. Trust sustains practice--a gracious spiral into sacred space.
