Questions about life, before, during and after: An Easter reflection

I had a rare opportunity a couple of Sunday’s back of being present at Dunham Road as people began to arrive. This was because we could not conduct worship at Urmston as the town was cut off due to the Manchester Marathon. As I stood at the entrance of the chapel I found myself chatting with Martin and Carolyn. Carolyn was sharing her thoughts on an interesting talk she had heard that week given by a Hindu woman discussing her traditions perspective and understanding of reincarnation. Martin and myself listened with interest and I remember saying something like "I’m not sure what I believe about such things." We made the usual, probably inappropriate, jokes of hoping we don’t come back as a slug or something similar. I then went and led worship, interestingly we were exploring the subject of “What you give your heart to.” A little later I was thinking about the conversation and remembered a similar one I had only a few weeks earlier with a woman called Elaine. Elaine is very important in Sue’s life. She is someone who guides her spiritually and has led a women’s circle that Sue has participated in these last 12 months. Sue had asked me if I minded having my astrological chart "done" by Elaine. I agreed to, although part of me felt a little unsure about it. I gave my birth details, the time, date and place and then went to meet Elaine for the results. I enjoyed both a wonderful and fascinating conversation with Elaine, during which she asked me if I believed in past lives. I said “I just don’t know. I am truly agnostic about past lives and even what happens to us after we die. I said I suspect that some aspect of us lives on but in what form I have no clue, I have to declare myself as truly agnostic about these things, as I have no knowledge. That said I am open minded, open hearted and my spirit is certainly open to the possibility, but that I prefer to think about one life at a time. That’s more than enough for me. Whatever happens to us when we die it cannot be any stranger than this life, which day by day seems to be way beyond my imaginings. It’s funny I do not feel agnostic about a relationship with a Power Greater than myself in this life, I call myself a “Universal Theist”, but what happened before and after this life I can offer very little I am afraid. Although day by day, as I live more spiritually alive I find myself believing ever more in the possibility.

We humans often ask the question, what happens to us when we die, but how many of us ask what happens before we are even born? That may well be a far more interesting question.

Having professed my agnosticism about the afterlife I am now going to contradict myself as I believe strongly that loves lives on in the lives of those we have touched, even after our physical lives end. I know this from personal experience. So perhaps there is some formed idea here. They are part of us in spirit in some way, sometimes I can feel that powerfully. As the song goes, “The ghosts are part of us.” Forrest Church put it so beautifully when he said: “The greatest of all truths is that love never dies, that every act of love that we perform in this life is carried on into another life and passed on into another life, so that centuries from now the love carries, and that is the work of religion. The opposite of love is not death. It is fear. Fear is what armors our hearts. If our hearts are armored, they’ll never be broken, and I have seen so many people get hurt in love and then try to protect themselves against it, and when they protect themselves against love, they protect themselves against the only thing that is worth living for.”

I would add to that that the purpose of religion is to bring that love to life and to share it with our world. This is the work of transformation. This to me is the true message of Easter.

There are many layers to the “Easter Mythos”, that if we allow it to can touch all of us. In order to be touched by the magic of Easter you do not have to believe in the actual bodily resurrection of Jesus, you can believe in Easter without having to accept that this actually happened. In fact perhaps it loses some of its power if we focus purely on this. What is clear to me is that Easter is about the Power of Love that grew from that empty tomb. Whatever we may think about bodily resurrection, something definitely lived on beyond the physical death of Jesus. While his body may no longer have remained in the empty tomb, some beautiful aspect of his life certainly remained. Love was born again, even after the body was killed.

I believe it is the same with every life and the love that life leave behinds, something beautiful always remain.

This brings to mind those beautiful words often shared at funerals by that famous author “Unknown”

“Something Beautiful Remains” – Unknown

The tide recedes but leaves behind
bright seashells on the sand.
The sun goes down, but gentle
warmth still lingers on the land.
The music stops, and yet it echoes
on in sweet refrains.....
For every joy that passes,
something beautiful remains.

Every life leaves its mark. Every life impacts in some way. We should never think that we are insignificant, that we do not matter. We impact on everyone and everything around us. Everything that we do and everything that do not do matters. There are those who I have known and who have loved me, who have been gone many years, who are still impacting on my life. Of their lives, something beautiful remains.

Easter is a reminder to me that even after death something beautiful remains. It is an acknowledgement of life’s sacredness. It is a reaffirmation of life that not even death can end. Easter for me is about birth and re-birth, again and again and again…

But what about “Resurrection”? What can that mean? Well “Resurrection” for me is about bringing to life the love that was born again on Easter morning. I have come to believe that this is truly our religious task. I believe that this is what it means to bring to life the “Kingdom of Heaven” that is constantly spoken of in the Biblical accounts. What I have come to call the “Kin-dom” of Love”, for all are equal in such a Commonwealth. To live in such a way of being is to recognise the oneness of all life.

This actually brings me back to astrological thinking and Elaine’s charts. She suggested to me that I had lived many lives. and that that I was at a stage of real potential right now, if I was willing to take it. This got me thinking of Joseph Campbell and his views of mythos. He wrote of Easter: “It is very much the longing to be born anew the way nature is. All these elements fit together. Easter is calculated as the Sunday that follows the first full moon after the vernal equinox. It is evidence of a concern centuries before Christ to coordinate the lunar and solar calendars. What we have to recognize is that these celestial bodies represented to the ancients two different modes of eternal life, one engaged in the field of time, like throwing off death, as the moon it’s shadow, to be born again; the other, disengaged and eternal. The dating of Easter according to both lunar and solar calendars suggests that life, like the life that is reborn in the moon and eternal in the sun, finally is one.”

This got me thinking of Easter as a metaphor for bringing about this oneness of all life. That what Jesus was trying to teach humanity about  was oneness, about harmony. Isn’t this what the “Kin-dom of Love” is?

This brings to mind the following passage from the Gospel of Thomas, one of the many that was not included in the Bible:

Jesus said to them:

When you make the two one,
and when you make the inner as the outer
and the outer as the inner
and the above as the below,
and when you make the male and the female
into a single one
. . . then shall you enter [the Kingdom]

Now of course many believe that the Kingdom is the place that we go to when we die, if chosen. I do not believe that this is what Jesus was speaking of in the Gospels. Remember he said (in the Canonical Gospels) that the “kingdom is within you” or that it is “at hand” (here now). I believe that he was teaching that the key is to bring “The King-dom” alive within ourselves and to share that with our world, therefore building the beloved community of love. I have come to believe that this is the love that is born again as the stone was rolled away and seemingly found to be empty, because from that emptiness love was once again, born again.

From nothing comes everything; from Despair is born Hope.

We all have this day, we all have this time, what shall we do with it? The key I believe is to fully live it. To bring forth what is within us. To incarnate love in our lives is to become fully alive. The second century philosopher Irenaeus said “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.” This to me is the word becoming flesh and dwelling amongst us, this is the divine love fully alive. This is truly bringing forth the kingdom that is within us. If you want to know the divine presence in life, then all you have to do is to find the courage to live fully alive and then to bless the world with your very presence and thus inspire others to do the same. And thus enjoy the kingdom of God, the kin-dom of love right now.

It’s time to bring the kin-dom of love to life. It is time to begin living this one wonderful life we have been given…

This is the Love that is born again on Easter morning. This is what grows from the emptiness of the tomb when the stone is rolled away…From nothing to everything…From Despair, Hope is born again…

Now I would like to end with these words of blessing by David Whyte.

“Easter Blessing”

The blessing of the morning light to you,
may it find you even in your invisible
appearances, may you be seen to have risen
from some other place you know and have known
in the darkness and that that carries all you need.
May you see what is hidden in you
as a place of hospitality and shadowed shelter,
may that hidden darkness be your gift to give,
may you hold that shadow to the light
and the silence of that shelter to the word of the light,
may you join all of your previous disappearances
with this new appearance, this new morning,
this being seen again, new now, and newly alive.

David Whyte: Easter Morning 2015
In Memoriam John O’Donohue

The Strange Arithmetic of Christmas

The following reflection has been growing in my heart and soul for a couple of weeks now and has inspired my own little relfection that follows...

"The Strange Arithmetic of Christmas” by Jeremiah Jenkins

I deliberately requested your minister to allow me to write to you about Christmas. I was a teacher of arithmetic for fifteen years in a preparatory school, so I want to write about the inverted arithmetic of Christmas.

Christmas differs from figures and sums and dollars and crowds-at-a football game. You can add these together and get more. But with Christmas, you can add all the Santa Clauses on earth and there is still only one Santa Claus. Or all the trees and there is still only one Tree. Or perhaps all the births of children but there is still only one Bethlehem story. Or all the families, and there is still one family – yours!

It is when you start dividing Christmas that it begins to grow. It multiplies with division. It defies the rules. If you have six TV sets and give two or three away, you have less. But when it comes to the richness of love, the currency of gratitude or the document of faith, the more you give the more you possess. To teach is to learn. To encourage someone and give them your faith is to strengthen your own faith. To love is to know love.

Christmas is like a lot of things; it can be misused. I think it was never meant for raucous public displays. Its carols were not intended to be blared into the streets. Its colors probably were not meant to be emblazoned like advertising – or even associated with advertising. Christmas is the artistry of the world; it is the subtle touch, the gentle word, the endearing act, the loving gift. Share these qualities, divide them, and you will find miraculously that they have grown with division. This is the strange arithmetic of Christmas.

"The Strange Arithmetic of Christmas" I've been thinking about this for quite some time now, it has been growing, nay multiplying in my heart an soul...

Social media is full of quotations and Meme’s proclaiming little bits of wisdom. Some make sense to me, others do not. Many seem to contradict one another and depending on my mood, or the status of my soul, I can find myself agreeing and disagreeing with them. The one thing that is consistent about me is my very inconsistency. Or maybe the truth is that contradictions are true, depending on certain aspects of our humanity; two opposing truths can actually be true, depending on what parts of our our lives they are speaking of.

I recently came across the following quotation from that great medieval heretical mystic Meister Eckhart:

“God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a process of subtraction.”

It instantly brought to my mind “The Strange Arithmetic of Christmas.” Particularly the following sentences:

"It is when you start dividing Christmas that it begins to grow. It multiplies with division. It defies the rules. If you have six TV sets and give two or three away, you have less. But when it comes to the richness of love, the currency of gratitude or the document of faith, the more you give the more you possess. To teach is to learn. To encourage someone and give them your faith is to strengthen your own faith. To love is to know love…”

“…Christmas is the artistry of the world; it is the subtle touch, the gentle word, the endearing act, the loving gift. Share these qualities, divide them, and you will find miraculously that they have grown with division. This is the strange arithmetic of Christmas.”

Gosh I love this…What beautiful un-common sense!!! Makes sense to me…

Now before I continue an apology. I’m talking here about a subject I cannot claim to be an expert in, mathematics. I say this although I was a champion at mental arithmetic at primary school, my cousin told me it was because I was the most mental in my school. She may well be right. Arithmetic wasn’t a problem for me, it was mathematics I just couldn’t fathom, algebra and trigonometry etc. just made no sense at all to my brain.

So apologies if what I write is difficult to make sense of. This is because what I am attempting to share is un-commonsense. What I have come to believe is that what we lack today is not really common sense, we have perhaps too much of that. What I believe we need more of is the un-commonsense that lies at the heart of everything. What I’m attempting to share with you is, what I have come to believe, a beautiful and essential paradox. It is the true gift at the heart of the spirit of the season, the strange arithmetic of Christmas. How the spiritual life does indeed defy the perceived laws of nature as we understand them. How by giving away a particular commodity not only does the person receiving gain, but so does the giver and all who are caught up in this activity. You see what I have learnt, what the strange arithmetic of Christmas has taught me, is that the more love you give away the more love you experience. In fact if you want to fill the cup of love, that you hold in your heart, the first thing you must do is empty it and pour it out on all who you share this world with you.

Unfortunately many of us lack the courage, the heart, to empty our cups…

Through living spiritually I have leant that it is through the process of subtraction, rather than addition, that my soul grows and it is through division rather than multiplication that my heart is filled.

This to me is the heart of Christmas, this giving from the heart to others. This is the key message of Christianity as I see it, self-giving love. By the way I am not suggesting that it is unique to Christianity. I find it at the heart of all the faith traditions I have come to know too.

Self-giving love is a love that grows the more that we give it away. A love that is at the core of each and every one of us if we would but nurture it in the mangers of our own hearts and give birth to it in our living and breathing.

This is what Christmas means to me and why as the years have gone by I have come to believe in Christmas more and more.

I believe in Christmas, the soul of Christmas, the spirit of Christmas, the heart of Christmas the religion of Christmas more today than I ever did at any moment in my life. Today I believe everything about Christmas and a whole lot more than everything that we think we know.

Now don’t get me wrong here I am not suggesting that I believe that everything that the Gospel accounts recounted actually happened. I really can’t answer that, I wasn’t there. Were any of us who argue about it actually there? No of course not. What I mean when I say I believe in Christmas more today than I have ever done before is that I believe in the universal mythos that lies in the soul of the story. I believe in the story and what it has to teach humanity regardless of time and or space.

I also believe we need Christmas more today than at any other time before, for we mock the bells at Christmas time probably more today than we ever did before. The problem I suspect is that we do not hear the message at the heart of Christmas…Maybe we have forgotten how to listen or perhaps we have forgotten how to deliver the message.

So how do we hear the message of Christmas and perhaps most importantly how do we ourselves become Father Christmas, become Santa Claus, how do we deliver Christmas ourselves into everyone’s home?

Well here is where the contradiction comes in. We need both emptiness and fullness. We need clarity of mind and abundance of love. We need an empty mind and a full heart; we need both an empty cup and at the same time one that is full to overflowing. Now this probably doesn’t sound like sense to most, but then Christmas isn’t about common sense it is about un-common sense.

I will try to explain what I mean, beginning with the following story:

There is a story of a university professor who visited a Japanese master to inquire about Zen. The professor began to ask questions while the master just sat quietly, listening. After a while the master began to pour tea into the professor’s cup. The cup soon filled up, but the master did not stop pouring. The tea soon began to spill over on to the table. Initially the professor just sat there in stunned silence, he did not know what to do. Eventually he could take no more and shouted out “It’s overfull. No more will go in!” The master stopped pouring and simply said “Like this cup you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

To bring this spirit of Christmas to life in our lives requires a certain kind of emptiness. A certain kind of stillness. We need this to hear the still small voice, to hear the angels calling, to be like little children to learn all that this season has to offer us. You see the problem for so many of us is that we think that we know so much, we think we are so clever, but all we have done is killed the spirit of the season. Our so called common sense, our rejection of the spirit of the season, “our glad tidings of reason and fact, reason and fact, glad tidings of reason and fact” has filled our minds to overflowing and as a result there is no room for the spirit of the season.

We also live such busy and full lives, that paradoxically can feel so empty. We never seem to have a minute to simply be still and to feel the season. To truly know the spirit of the season we need time for silence and stillness, we need spiritual practice. We need time for prayer and meditation, a time to empty the mind so as to hear the cries of those in need and the songs of the angels and to let the love present in all of us to fill our hearts.

We need to empty our minds so that we can once again begin to fill our hearts.

And how do we fill our hearts? Well it’s quite simple really. We become like Father Christmas, like Santa Claus. We fill our hearts, like his sacks and stockings, by giving our hearts away. By practising this strange arithmetic of Christmas. We multiply by division. By giving our hearts away we receive all the love and a whole lot more than we could ever wish for. Of course we cannot measure this in the way that we can measure other commodities of life, except through our own lived human experiences. This is the strange paradox of giving though, the strange arithmetic of love that multiplies by division. It can only be measured by taking the time to reflect on our own lived experience and this requires stillness and silence.

This is how we deliver the gift at the heart of Christmas. This is how we bring the spirit to life not only for a day, or even a season, but for the rest of our lives. It is quite simple really, but it aint easy. It requires courage, it requires heart, it requires us to truly live from our hearts and to go against the grain of conventional truth. It requires that most priceless of commodities un-common sense.

It requires us to still ourselves in silence so as to hear the call of Christmas, isn’t that what this time of Advent, of preparation is about. To make ready those mangers in our own hearts and then to simply fill our hearts with the love we have been yearning for, by pouring out that love on all we share our lives with.

In so doing we will bring the spirit, the heart of the season to life. Christ will truly be born again. Love will be incarnated in and through our very lives…

For when our hearts are opened Christ is born again…

Love Letters: It matters what we leave behind

“Love letters” by Edward Hays in “Secular Society”

"You and I are meant to be “letters” to the world. People who “read” us receive a message from the Divine Mystery. Now, there’s a delightful vocation – to be a sort of “valentine” from God to a love-hungry world! But if we are to be living, divine letters, “words made flesh,” we, of all people, should keep alive and treat with respect the beautiful custom of letter writing. As we take time to do this, let us remember that such activity is always prayer. Let us remember that it is also prayer to receive and read a letter. Perhaps we could pause at the conclusion of having penned a note to a friend and trace the sign of the cross upon the letter to remind ourselves of this fact. Or we could breathe part of our spirit into the envelope. More than just a puff of breath, we could send along with our message a part of our soul. Since love is invisible, some ritual or sign helps us to remember what it is we are really sending when we send a letter to someone we love."

Huw a member of the Urmston congregation recently asked me if people treat me and act differently towards me since I lost the weight. I thought about it for a moment and said, no I don’t think so, or at least I hope not. After all I am still the same person I always was, it’s just that I now I live in a smaller shell than before.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot since. Do people treat me the same way now that I have transformed myself physically? Have the physical changes altered the way I am in the world? Do we judge people more on their appearance than on their inner being? Does the way we see ourselves affect the way we live with others and live in life?

The more I’ve thought about it the more I have become aware of people treating me differently actually. I’ve also realised that I am acting differently in the world and am once again seeing the world through fresh eyes. I have changed once again, or do I more accurately mean I have woken up once again. I am and will always be the same man in essence. This part of myself never changes the spirit that lays at the core of me. Whatever happens to my physical being, my emotional being and my mental being, this core always remains, although I believe that it just more awakened today. In fact there have been times in my life when that aspect of my being has been fast asleep.

There is no doubt to me that my physical, mental, emotional and spiritual being are interconnected, not one is separate from the rest. Just as all life is connected, nay interconnected. Nothing exists in isolation from anything else. Even the time we exist in now is influenced by all that has ever existed before. Yes we live in this moment right now. But this moment does not exist in isolation we only have this moment because of all that happened before and we are only the people that we are, in this moment, because of all that has existed before. We bring our whole selves alive in this precious moment right now. We do so by not rejecting any aspect of our lives up to now. We do so by allowing our whole being to come alive, to come to flower right here right now. This is what being alive really means. This is what bringing the moment alive really means. It is not enough to passively live in the moment, you’ve got to bring the moment fully alive. In so doing you live the life you are here to live and you play your part in the cosmic co-creation. All that we do and all that we do not do matters. Each moment that we live we leave behind us a legacy, a love letter if you like, that others will pick up on as they too continue on through their lives.

Just think of the people that have influenced you in your lives. People who are no longer physically with you, but who are still impacting on you today. Even when they are gone, something beautiful remains.

It matters how we live in the world. It matters how we see the world and think about the world and feel about the world. This is influenced by how we have lived in this world. It’s not just something that comes to us in isolation and it is influenced by how we see and experience ourselves.

Who do we think we are? What do we believe about ourselves? What do we see when we gaze at ourselves in the mirror, in the glass, in the water? Do we see ourselves with loving eyes, or with the eyes that despise? For how we see ourselves will influence how we see life and see others. You see we all do live by the “Golden Rule” we do in fact love or hate our neighbour as we love or hate ourselves. I just that one day we can all live by the Golden Rule of compassion and not of loathing or indifference.

My dad once shared a story with me, just weeks before he died. It’s one of those things that has stayed with me all these years and has only truly begun to make sense to me these last few years. Now whether it actually happened in his life, or not, doesn’t matter. I have come across versions of this story in my reading. What matters is the universal mythos in the tale. This is the story:

He recounted a tale when he was once at Appleby Horse Fair, a place he loved; where he was probably at his happiest. He was talking to me about faith and God. It was during a time of my life when I was a man of little or no faith; I certainly had no belief in God. He recounted that he saw a priest staring down into the water from a bridge. He asked the priest what he was doing and the priest told him that he was staring into God’s eyes. My dad looked into the water and said he could only see himself and the priest. At which point the priest replied that this is where God dwells within you, within me and within everything.

Whenever I remember this moment, that has stayed with me ever since, even in my darkest hours, my nihilistic despair, the memory would come alive deep within me. Its real meaning only really made sense many years later. What I do know is that whenever I looked into the water or into the glass, whatever I saw looking back at me was reflected in how I saw life and lived in the world. It impacted on how I lived in whatever moment, whatever place and whatever people I found myself in the company of.

When I look at life today and when I look deeply, compassionately into the eyes of others I can see something of the Divine present there, sometimes awake and sometimes fast asleep. Most of the time though, somewhere in between.

The very first Unitarian I ever met was Peter Sampson. I met him as I passed through the threshold of Cross Street Chapel all those years ago. He taught me so much about what it means to live as a human being. He is also a talented poet and hymn writer. He wrote the following piece for a collection of named "Heart and Mind" It speaks powerfully to me,

“Incarnation” by Peter Sampson

'"The incarnation is true not of Christ exclusively but of Man universally and God everlastingly. He bends into the human to dwell there and humanity is the susceptible organ of the divine."

James Martineau (1805-1900)

James Martineau’s distinctly Unitarian ‘take’ on the transformation of God into our human – all too human – flesh and blood has been a constant inspiration to me.

Our responsibility for our own lives and necessarily, for the lives of our brothers and sisters throughout the world lays upon us all a duty which cannot be dodged; our humanity is defined by how we serve and care for the needs of the human family. You can’t have faith without works and working for the good of all inspires our faith in God-given life.

It is a small comfort to me to be told that God died for our sins. I see every one of us missing the mark in our lives and whenever a fellow-creature is harmed we must pray for forgiveness for ourselves. We are all culpable but if we are to serve human progress we have to say ‘sorry’ from the bottom of our heart and move on.

When we look around us we tend to focus on what’s going wrong: suffering – often caused by human ignorance – waste, devastation, degradation, contempt, the whole sorry spectacle of “Man’s in humanity to Man”. I see this as a betrayal of our God-given humanity, a trivialisation of our God-endowed divinity.

Resorting to armaments and inflexible war-talk of politicians, shouting at those we don’t agree with and throwing our weight about if we don’t get our own way – I want to say “Come off it! Who do you think you are? There is that of God in every person, in every creature on the planet.

Peter's piece begins with the following quote by the great 19th century Unitarian James Martineau who stated that:'

"The incarnation is true not of Christ exclusively but of Man universally and God everlastingly. He bends into the human to dwell there and humanity is the susceptible organ of the divine."

Could this be true? Is humanity the susceptible organ of the divine?

I do believe that there is that of God in everyone, but that is not all that we are. Yes we have the potential to do incredible things we humans and I do believe that God lives through our lives. But that is not all that we are, we are also capable of incredible hatred, destruction and evil. I believe that both these potentials lay within each of us. It is important that I recognise this when I look at another and when I look at myself. When I look at another person I must recognise myself within them. This sometimes fills me with absolute bliss and on other occasions it fills me with nothing but agony. Humanity is a mysterious duality indeed.

Abraham Joshua Heschel said the following of man...

“Man is a duality of mysterious grandeur and pompous aridity, a vision of God and a mountain of dust. It is because of his being dust that his iniquities may be forgiven, it is because of his being an image that his righteousness is expected.”

It is an incredible thing to be human, we are fascinating creatures. Even the word human itself interests me. It is formed from the same root as humility, possibly humanity’s greatest attribute. It is also closely related to humus (not to be confused with hummus) and exhume. The root for all of these words is “hum” which originally referred to the earth or dirt. Our earliest forbears perceived that we humans originated from the soil – you would think that this would keep us grounded, but seemingly not - this is made clear in the second creation story found in Genesis II which reads “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” The ancient Hebrew word for Adam is closely related to the word “toadamah” which means soil or earth. There are other ancient creation stories too which associate the origin of humankind with soil or the ground. Such as the Sumerian myth of Marduk who created people by killing Qingu and mixing his blood with clay. Or the Greek myths of Decallion and Pyrrha who by throwing rocks over their shoulders created man and woman.

We are indeed a mysterious duality we humans. Yes formed from dust but with the spirit of the Divine breathed into our very being.

We need to remember this when we look into one another’s eyes and when we look into our own eyes. For how we see ourselves and how we see one another will impact on how we live in the world and that really matters. We need to look a little deeper than the surface too, for that will change. Beauty is more than skin deep, our real beauty and true essence lays way beneath the surface of our skin; it is way deeper than our thinking minds and our feeling emotions. It is in our essence, our spirit our souls. This never changes, it remains the same it’s just that it awakens and goes to sleep at different times and stages of our lives.

How awake and alive we are in the world in this moment really matters too. For how we live will impact on those around us too and will impact on how they live in the world, for no one and no-thing lives in isolation.

In every moment of our lives we are creating and leaving a legacy for those who share this time and those who follow in this beautiful co-creation that is life. Each moment we leave behind us letters that those who follow will then pick up and read and be influenced. So let us ensure that the letters we leave behind are letters of love and not of indifference, letters of Hope and not of Despair.

I’m going to end this little chip of a "blogspot" with this beautiful extract from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd
by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever.