Today is about communication, skills, insight. Recognition of where I’ve been, where I am, and this spiral journey we each traverse in our own timing. More than 39 intersections revealed themselves in 15 hours, all while the power of precise words rippled in me. I thought of the gaps in intent and impact of what we say and write, and how challenging it is to express the best message when a friend is hurting or a community needs facts. Everything occupying my time and craft today entailed precise words and analysis.
In the #DisturbTheGap I remember with pride crafting something meaningful: writing and editing 40 issues over ten years of “Listen: A Seeker’s Resource for Spiritual Direction,” a quarterly publication for Spiritual Directors International, which was known as a global learning community of spiritual guides. Tonight I returned to that first issue—the words are perennial and still speak to me. Then an intersection tickled into listening with a 10:09 PM text from a coworker who saw the why-I-stayed-late school district communications work on the 10:00 PM evening news.
Listen: Let Your Life Speak
Listen, Listen! Words, sounds and vibrations are all around us seeking to heal, to guide, and to initiate action. Traffic and solitude, commitments and conversation, and the activity of your particular life all invite a response of some kind. Whether you are eighteen or eighty, the journey of minutes and hours, days and years begs a response from you that can be life-giving or deadly. So the choice is given: Live with passion and presence, and engage with others. Or, don’t.
It is valuable to occasionally ask ourselves some honest questions such as these:
• Is meaning encountered in my daily living?
• Am I a person of peace and justice?
• Is this a season when I sense something more that I can grow and live into?
• Do I experience a general malaise and discontent, and if so, do I know why?
Perhaps the current time of your life is full of light. You find yourself alive with integrity of passion and purpose. Or maybe this is a season of transition, often the place of unknowing or not quite yet. Possibly this is a starlit time of sorrow and letting go. Wherever you reside, and however you engage with the particularities of your daily life, you are a woman or a man created for love, peace, and companionship. Learning to listen to inner promptings and the world around you will guide you to fullness of existence.
How do we learn to listen to inner longings and inspiration? It’s simple: pay attention. Show up. Be still. Breathe deeply. Slow down. Listen. And, where do we begin to listen? To our sacred stories—yours and mine—that continually unfold over time. Listen to the story of the universe. Listen to the world’s beauty and hunger. Listen in the city, the wilderness, at home, with family, in community, and at the workplace. Listen to sorrow, to hope. Listen to mystery and the unknown. Most of all, listen to the present time.
–Pegge (Bernecker) Erkeneff, Listen: A Seeker’s Resource for Spiritual Direction, Vol 1.1, April 2007
photo: Thanks to the Image Blender and Distressed FX photo apps, the original 2007 cover photo of Listen intersects with an image from an evening of solitude being present to shore birds, and shifting light near a palm grove on the island of Molokai in the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes I find it is valuable to repurpose content, and revisit the wisdom of the past, so we can more accurately pilot in the present moment and emerging future.
From that first essay I wrote 11 years ago from my home office in northern Colorado, less than a year after my son died … I could never have dreamed or predicted I’d be living in the woods of Alaska, with Kenai the Chesapeake Retriever now age 13 at my side in his twilight days, and a five-year-old Labrador curled at my side propping up my elbow, and that I’d be investing my days as a communications professional for a school district, still determined to listen and let my life speak. There’s some brand new tears welling in me at the moment. More about that later.
