| ANNE WILLIAMSON |
I spend a lot of my life thinking about time: I really need to go to bed. Is it time to wake-up already? Shoot, I'm not going to get my daughter on time! Do I have time to grab Starbucks? I need to take more time to prayer. I need more time to listen. Do you value my time? Am I demonstrating I value yours? I have to go! What time can you talk? What day can we get together? It's dinner time; it's time to pick up your toys; TV time is up; it's time for a bath; it's potty time; it's bed time!
I know you get it. Whatever our season of life, whatever our circumstances, time is elusive. We cannot catch it. We can only learn to ride it, to breath into it, to feel its current and float without drowning.
Easier said than done. Especially in a world where the setting of the sun and dial-up modems no longer delineate our time for us. So how can we?
I think ritual is a great place to start. Once exclusively associated with the expression of religious belief, more and more we're breaking rituals open, allowing them to help us set apart time and space whatever our beliefs. Anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann says, "Rituals change the way we pay attention." I, for one, need more of this. I need something to metaphorically slap me across the face, saying, "It's time now. Now, you must put the phone down, let go of your to-do list, and pay attention. It's time to practice being here, just here, miraculously here." LOVE. LEARN. LISTEN.
As an act of love this week for yourself, your family, this world, I invite you to attend WAYfinding's Community Week event: Shabbat - Leaning Into Time & Prayer. You need not have attended a WAYfinding event/group before, and all friends, kids, etc. are welcome. The Jewish faith does a wonderful job of using ritual to delineate and make time sacred, to help us pay attention. Come see what resonates for you! RSVPs appreciated.
Read the article "Religion Without God." What resonates for you? What questions are rising up? Ask them. Keep wondering. Keep listening.
“When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?”
How do you find this "jewel of infinity" in your life? What rituals - tea or not - draw you to pay attention, to be present? What might? What do you hear? Keep listening.