Virtues

Imprinted springerle cookies are a unique and delicious, anise-flavored art form. Today a surprise package arrived in the mail: springerle showcasing designs representing the twelve days of Christmas!  My sister painstakingly made these (and several other preliminary experimental batches) by hand. Their details are exquisite. 

In general, attention to detail and quality workmanship seem to be fading these days.  Like genuine sincerity, hard work, and discipline, they’ve become outdated in a techno-world intent on speed and ease.

I am grateful for these well-crafted gifts that represent virtues like careful patience, kindness and generosity, and simple but elegant beauty.  They are lovely.

Sight

Today’s freezing rain shrink-wrapped everything.

Earlier this afternoon frozen raindrops collected on the deck as tiny, pristine messengers: beauty.

Later, as light faded, the outdoor world seemed distorted when viewed through panes of glass on our door and porch window: mystery.

Perceptions.

The external enters through our eyes, but also through the eye of the soul – what the ancients called the “nous.” This kind of vision discerns from the center of our beings, either with cataracts in the case of a soul that is broken or unwell, or clearly in the case of one that is healed.

What a challenge, to test our vision and what we truly see.

The Olive Cart

I received some gourmet oils and vinegars as a Christmas gift from my daughter-in-law.  She's so thoughtful to support my foodie interests with something new and unique!

Today I tried combining the roasted chili pepper balsamic vinegar with the toasted onion avocado olive oil, and using the mixture as a salad dressing on baby greens, tomatoes, Bermuda onion, goat feta, hardboiled eggs, and toasted sunflower seeds.  OH MY GOODNESS!  The dressing was incredibly delicious!  I think I'm spoiled for life...will never-ever be able to go back to the plan stuff after this amazing culinary experience.  :-)

Here's the web site for the Olive Cart (store where she bought them) if you're interested in looking around and being duly inspired:  http://www.olivecart.com/

By Design

This afternoon I stepped through the sliding glass doors into winter’s chill, and approached the lakefront for the first time in awhile.  During cold weather I regularly watch the lake from the house, but too often neglect to visit it - to connect and pay attention to its influence, which can sometimes be profound.

Graceful grasses framed the wooden step as I took a seat at the water’s edge, and continued to loom above my head: floppy guardians. I invited the surroundings to enter me, to reveal the moment.

A single dry oak leaf drifted slowly beside the seawall directly in front, and a pair of swans floated idly out in the lake.  As soon as they noticed me, the majestic white birds, usually independent and even haughty by nature, began paddling in my direction as if in greeting.   

I could feel it – the fact that each component in this scene also belonged to a larger unity.  This was about integration, as if everything in the moment (myself included) was called into a more extensive, preexisting-but-still-emerging story.  Called into purpose.

This has been a common theme in the past, and yet I was grateful to internalize it again. I returned the house inspired to step out in faith.

Celtic Prayer

I am giving Thee worship with my whole life,

I am giving Thee assent with my whole power,

 I am giving Thee praise with my whole tongue,

 I am giving Thee honor with my whole utterance,

 I am giving Thee love with my whole devotion,

 I am giving Thee kneeling with my whole desire,

 I am giving Thee love with my whole heart,

 I am giving Thee affection with my whole sense,

 I am giving Thee my existence with my whole mind,

 I am giving Thee my soul, O God of all gods.

A Peculiar Gift

Gaily wrapped packages await Christmas morning beneath our tree.  And yet this evening I’m focused on a different gift, a “peculiar gift” described by Thomas Merton. 

In the following quote, Merton describes being liberated from self-isolation. In a particular moment in a public place, he suddenly sees everyone walking around, shining like the sun, and realizes humanity’s most secret beauty hides out in deep heart-places beyond even self-knowledge.  This is a mystical image, and yet gripping when we realize this kind of core reality is a matter of understanding what is gifted to us rather than whatever we seek and struggle to attain.

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world…

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.”

― Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

Jessica's Butterfly

A pearl-studded, hand-blown glass butterfly has been one of my favorite Christmas ornaments for many years.  It was given to me by a young employee of my bakery business in the mid-1990’s, an old soul for her years with a deep heart. 

Jessica and I sometimes worked together in early morning hours before the store opened.  On one side of our workstation, she sang songs to herself, the yeast dough, God, and the whole created universe.  Meanwhile, I decorated cakes on the other side. Her voice filled the entire place and all of me, a melodious calling out to life for personal fulfillment.

Sometimes when we talked, things got serious.  I assured her that soon she would experience a sort of metamorphosis, and fly like a transformed butterfly gone free.  I watched her desire for this swell and mature, and she gave me this butterfly as a token of our shared celebration for what was forthcoming. 

Now, all these years later, she is a thriving wife and mother, living her dream.