This was our last WiW experience until we resume again in September. There were only two of us… so the blog entry is a bit short. Although we did not have a formal opening reading, I offer this reflection by poet David Whyte… wishing that you might rest in an “inner state of natural exchange” over the warm, sultry summer. Blessings to all… 

 

Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is the essence of giving and receiving; an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually but also psychologically and physically. To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals. To rest is to give up worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we are there to put it right; to rest is to fall back literally or figuratively from outer targets and shift the goal not to an inner static bull’s eye, an imagined state of perfect stillness, but to an inner state of natural exchange.

The template of natural exchange is the breath, the autonomic giving and receiving that forms the basis and the measure of life itself. We are rested when we are a living exchange between what lies inside and what lies outside, when we are an intriguing conversation between the potential that lies in our imagination and the possibilities for making that internal image real in the world; we are rested when we let things alone and let ourselves alone, to do what we do best, breathe as the body intended us to breathe, to walk as we were meant to walk, to live with the rhythm of a house and a home, giving and taking through cooking and cleaning. When we give and take in an easy foundational way we are closest to the authentic self, and closest to that self when we are most rested. To rest is not self indulgent, to rest is to prepare to give the best of ourselves, and to perhaps, most importantly, arrive at a place where we are able to understand what we have already been given.

Excerpts from David Whyte; Rest; Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, 2015

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Summer Joy

The lotus flower and water lily

blush in the morning sun,

How intricate and magnificent their colors and form.

The breeze holds all in its tender embrace.

The dragon fly sips the nectar of life.

A brilliant canopy of white on blue.

New blooms, full blossoms, flowers gone by,

and all the in between.

Tremendously grateful for this place,

I thank God for this day.

 

Photos and poetry by Nancy L.