Week 3 : Be Awed By Life
“How filled with awe is this place and we did not know it.”
Reading: Complete Section I of the book, “Receiving Your Blessings.” As before, read slowly and allow your mind to move toward stories in your life triggered by the reading. Pay attention to these stories, trusting they have something important to teach you. If you find you are coming to your reading as a chore, put the book aside and choose something more meaningful instead.
Kind Action: Consider the miraculous in every day things. If you get a cut, how is that it can heal? In biting into a fresh apple, how is it that it was grown? In smelling a flower, how did it get its fragrance? Be filled with awe and wonder this week, even at the simplest of things. Having practiced this for a few days, take time to write up one of your awe-inspired moments for the rest of us and post it here in the comments section. In reading what others have posted, be filled with awe and wonder that someone in some other part of the world has written a story that you are somehow managing to read and experience in your part of the world. It’s incredible, isn’t it?
Blessings Journal: This is the perfect week to use your journal to its fullest, or to start one if you have yet to do so. Remember, it need not be anything big, just a few pieces of paper held together by the clip on a pen is enough. Use it to jot down those things that inspire you. Allow these to fill you with awe.
Link to Book: “My Grandfather’s Blessings”
Kind Living 
I am in awe of the profound realization in Teachers Everywhere: “everyone of the people around us had a secret wisdom; each of them knew something more about how to live, about being happy, about loving than I did…It will always be that way.”
Thinking that if you take all of that secret wisdom and put it together it would create one, universal, divine being. Our secret wisdom is the Divine living within each of us.
I never know who to give credit to – the person who touches my heart, or to myself for having a heart open to people who let me touch them. This week has been very stressful as my husband and I were deciding whether to close on a house or let it go because of some undiscovered problems revealed by the inspection. I am detail oriented and he is always looking at the big picture, so I was in agony trying to make sure we did not get in over our heads with repairs at age 68.
As I struggled, the lovely young woman realtor, who just stopped by our door one day with a flyer about a house she was selling, asking if we knew “anyone looking to buy a house” was able to assuage my angst. We had less than three weeks and we did not have a realtor representing us, so I was somewhat uncomfortable from the start.
But this young woman, was right there for me, holding my hand, letting me vent my fears and doubts, encouraging me to know that up till “due dilligence” we could still back out!!! At one point, we had a meeting with the owners and at the end I told them Tommy was ready but I wasn’t yet there. Afterwords, she said to me,”I don’t want you to buy the house if you don’t really want to.” I am confident she thought the house would sell, but she was reassuring me that the world would not end for anyone if we did not buy it. I was so grateful for that.
After that, I began to relax and look at the positives and we went forward, but then not all the money (no mortgage) was going to be ready on time. We could borrow and pay interest on the loan for a couple days, but once again, not in her own interest, this young woman said she “did not want us to pay interest for two days.” She got us an extension from the owners. signing papers yesterday.
It was wonderful that she had the personal skills to hear and see my doubts and to help me through the process even if it meant she lost this sale. I think she is a rare human being and I am so looking forward to having a new young friend in my life when we return.
And a new house Linda, congratulations! I am finding with this exercise this week that, not only am I seeing the simplest things with fresh eyes, I am also almost bowled over by the things much larger on the “awe scale.” The ability for people to be there for us – to find so much compassion in people (like your realtor). I am an actor and yesterday while attending a celebration of young new playwrights, I really thought about the pricess of creating an existence, the character, that an actor goes through. I am truly in awe of this kind of process. There is so much wonder and beauty in the world. I have been far more focused on the beauty. I am sure, if I thought about it, I would be in awe of the power to wreak havoc as well. Above all, the capacity of life at its simplest, rawest existence is quite huge. Much to ponder and many new moments to experience today. I hope your life and everyone’s is filled with awe and blessings today.
Carrie, thank you for your comments. They touched me. I marvel at the similarities that just serendipitiously happen in my life. I may have mentioned, I was a professional lighting designer mostly for modern dance, but theatre as well. I began my involvement with theatre when I was in 9th grade and was cast in the “class play.” I have acted in many plays, so your comments resonate with me even though it has been nearly thirty years since I have been on stage. I always loved acting because I got to be “somebody else.” I think what we do here in this class is somewhat similar – we can be somebody else, the else that lives inside us that perhaps we lost touch with in our youth (which I think I did) and become a person that we really like and love! When I read the posts of others, I feel a connection and my “love’ flows out in the world towards others like you. Consider yourself loved today by me….