winter, homecoming

The sacred landscape is a window into the other worlds. It is a place where beings encounter each other, and meet themselves. Be open. If you see something, pay attention!

The heart is the hub of all sacred places.
Go there and roam in it.

Landscape is more than flat land covered by floodwater, the seeping of peat bogs, a river of liquid pewter viewed from a tower. It's an influence on what a person values, what she is willing to sacrifice or argue for. The interior landscape of a soul is, in part, a reflection of the exterior landscape.

After one hundred days of confinement following a bone marrow transplant, I rejoiced in taking short walks to a nearby park. The uncertainty of my survival made every blade of grass gorgeous in its green intensity, lifting itself up, doing its part to make the world more beautiful. Every breeze touching my neck was a gift, revitalizing me. I looked a the world tenderly, intensely, gratefully.

The lesson which life repeats and constantly enforces is "look under foot." You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own home and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is of the world.

Harry Emerson Fosdick urges the case for peaceful homes as places of nurturance. Nevertheless, he recognizes that our homes can become bastions against the world if they are not connected to work for the sake of the world outside. Fosdick affirms the ultimate purpose of peaceful homes:

O God of life, send from above
Thy succor, swift and strong,
That from such homes stout souls may come
To triumph over wrong.

Understood in this way, our homes are places of nurture but also of preparation. From such places some stalwart souls will envision the world in new ways.

HOME is not only a refuge and a sanctuary. It can also be a workshop for the creation of our identity.

I have no home --
I make Awareness my home.

He stepped back and breathed more slowly, and what he saw, lit by warning washes of honey and gold, was a respite in stillness from the unacknowledged acts of women to hallow home. That stillness today, he thought, might be all he would ever know of the Realm of Heaven.

The springs of the truest prayer and the deepest poetry, twin expressions of our outward-going passion for that Eternity which is our home, rise very near together in the heart.

Spiritual life is a response to a call. Of our own accord we would never turn away from the world and begin the long and painful journey HOME. But Someone calls to us, calls to us from within the depths of our heart, awakening our own deepest longing. This call is like a golden thread that we follow, guiding us deeper and deeper within, always pointing to the beyond. It is both intimate and allusive, for it does not belong to the mind, but to the deepest core of our being. We hear it most easily when the conscious mind is still.