A Crossroads Moment

Today, I return from several weeks of Lenten retreat with a question for you, my dear readers.
 
What, as we resume “life as normal” do you need?  How can this space that I create each week with words, and possibly new offerings, serve the dimensions of you that have come newly alive during the pandemic?
 
I have some ideas (below), and very much invite your input.

Read on!

A wise woman recently shared a teaching she received years ago on pilgrimage to Iona Abbey in Mull, Scotland.  During a walk around its sacred sites, her guide stopped at a crossroads.

He told them,  “Don’t be in too much of a hurry to leave your crossroads.  Take your time.”

He meant: absorb the sacred resonances and implications of your choices.

Crossroads moments speak a unique language — of pause, possibility, of dream and desire, longing and fear, that no other space in our lives does.

Crossroads can be uncomfortable.  Each time we choose one thing, we must let others go.  In starting out on one path, we leave others untrod.

We know that we are approaching such a moment, in our collective and personal lives.

We watch the news to see what commercial ventures and travel opportunities will soon open.

And yet — we also openly discuss our dread of returning to “the way things were.”

 

This morning I invite you to take a few moments to consider these questions:

1.     What “goods” have you discovered (or rediscovered) in this time of enforced “retreat?”
 
2.     What are you glad or relieved to have let go of?
 
3.     What has sustained you, in ways you didn’t expect?

4.     What has come to be precious, and which you need support in preserving, as life’s demands resume?
 
—- Many of us have discovered our great hunger for a slower pace.

—- For the long gulps of solitude and silence that our days in quarantine or lockdown have provided.

—- Our consumption patterns have simplified.  Our pleasures have become those of childhood — planting seeds, going on walks to view the sunset, getting to know the resident hawk or squirrels, or neighbors.

—- We newly value meals with loved ones , conversations gone deeper.

We have found what we had lost — the inner space and time to let our imaginations and our souls move around in us, shift and grow and express themselves, in ways we had forgotten were possible.

So, please take a minute to drop me a line here in the Comments section — and read what others write.  My hope is that we can enter into conversation about new ways of going forward as the world turns again.

A few possibilities:

— Would you like a regular zoom community time to pray and share?
 
— What about teachings on prayer and meditation from the masters?
 
— Perhaps a “spiritual memoir” or “journal” workshop, in our newly-facile zoom world?

— A writing group?
 
Share your yearnings and hopes and desires.
 
The world will turn, yes.  We can be intentional about how we bring our gifts and desires to a new time.