Twenty-five years of listening to stories of pain in individuals' lives have taught me many important lessons. Perhaps the most important is the art of listening. If I reduce the pain I hear to a static moment or try to freeze it with my understanding, then I interrupt a process which always has a deeper meaning embedded within it. Pain is a messenger, a strange winged visitor that asks us to pay attention and listen beyond our usual preoccupations and concerns.
~ from NAVIGATING THE TIDES OF CHANGE by David La Chapelle
You are above me, O God You are within. You are in all things yet contained by no thing. Teach me to seek You in all that has life, that I may see You as the Light of light. Teach me to search for You in my own depths that I may find You in every living soul.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours. May the clarity of light be yours. May the fluency of the ocean be yours. May the protection of the ancestors be yours. And so may a slow wind work These words around you As an invisible cloak to guard your life.
