Ask & Receive

By: Julia Cameron
Transitions: Prayers and Declarations for a Changing Life

It's not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
~ Eugene Ionesco


Problems bear the seeds of their solutions. Beset
by worry or anxiety, unable to clearly see my way,
I remind myself that my soul is connected to all
wisdom. I will be led because I am led firmly and
certainly whenever I turn within for guidance. In
times of adversity, my store of my own inner wisdom
may be greater than I know. At such times, I continue
to ask for guidance while listening both within and
without for the many small signals which help me find
my way. The guidance of Spirit is always available to
me from many sources. Solutions emerge where questions
are posed.

~ Today, with humility and openness I ask for spiritual
intervention in my earthly affairs. I ask for help, and,
in the asking, it appears.

Disenchanted

By: William Bridges

“Disenchantment, whether it is a minor disappointment or a major shock, is the signal that things are moving into transition in our lives.”

Thirst

By: Kyle Elden

This pain calls me out
of locks and cages
breaks open the toughest
parts of me
like a stone down upon
a coconut in the middle of market
splitting apart round brown shell
revealing the soft white meat
spilling its sweet milk

I don’t understand
I don’t understand
I can’t understand
now

But it is love that trickles down
like sweat from my forehead,
across my upper lip, between my
breasts and on my low back, sweat
through this brutal climb

thirst gripping tightly
my throat, my dry lips
a thirst only for forgiveness, and

for letting the truth
stand
in the light of this new day,
dripping with the past,
puddles forming around
what was, what has been, what
happened

a thirst to say goodbye
to the past
with only tenderness
for the rough and jagged brokenness
for the soft and supple beauty

The End

excerpt from
The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir
By: Sarah Manguso

There are two kinds of decay: mine and everyone else's.

This is the usual sort of book about illness. Someone gets sick,
someone gets well.

Those who claim to write about something larger and more
significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the
dimensions of a self.

Most people consider their own suffering a widely applicable
model, and I am no exception.

This is suffering's lesson: pay attention. The important part might come to you in a form you do not recognize.

you might not know how to love it.

But to pay attention is to love everything.

To see the future as brightness

Everything that happens is the last time it happens. We see
things only as their own fatal brightness, and there is nothing
after that brightness.

You can't learn from remembering. You can't learn from guessing.

You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are
moved, as brightness, into brightness.