This week’s movement mantra.
This was first shared in my private Facebook group, Circle of Trees, but I felt like it might help others outside that group.
I go back and forth reading from A Year with Thomas Merton daily and right now I’m back at it. Today he was writing to me from 1964.
The Vietnam "war" was escalating and there were all kinds of other terrible things going on all over the world (he lists a bunch of them).
And he is exhausted and overwhelmed by all the things he feels he should be reading because "in good conscious" he wants to stay informed.
And he will read... but he decides he can't possibly read deeply about every single thing.
Then he says that Lent is about to start and he's so thankful for that and I GET IT.
Lent starts next Wednesday, and for the first time in a long time, I'm diving in deep.
Thanks to some important discussions with a good friend about folk Catholicism and my remembering of what I love about my devotion to Guadalupe and more, I feel really ready to integrate this more into my life again.
Lent is 40 days where we can kinda step out of human time (not completely of course) and into focused spiritual time.
I am going to give up some things...
I will be giving up added sugar and that might seem like the old "giving up chocolate" crap but this is really important to my health and I need this sort of commitment (lent) to make myself do it.
Even more importantly, I'm going to be working on giving up lethargy and apathy and I have a bunch of rituals/routines that I'll start playing with to do that.
Anyway... my larger point here (for me anyway) was that even a mind like Merton's often found the world just to be too much, but he stayed committed to witnessing regardless AND he took care of his spiritual needs.
Something to think about...
Because even if you don't "do Lent," 40 days is the traditional "sadhana" in Kundalini yoga too... the 40 day thing is everywhere and I think that it's a key timeline to creating change in human minds and bodies.