Stunning plumes of spray happen when the ocean crashes up against a rocky shoreline. While coming to rest on a soft, sandy beach is a lot more pleasant, we are often at our most impressive when we run up against the hard places.
When has running up against a hard place brought out the best in you?
What we think of as a mushroom or toadstool is merely a fruiting body for the real plant whose tiny tendrils weave outward in a broad, unseen net. What we see of anyone’s life is really just the public face that fails to show more than a tiny fraction of who they are.
What do you wish more people recognized about you and your unseen life?
Do you ever feel as if you are curled in on yourself, protecting what is most fragile inside you by wrapping it tight? What would it feel like to release that tension, to allow your body to stretch out in trust that there is room for you—all of you—in this world?
How do you make room for what is inside you to stretch and grow?
The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.
— Frederick Buechner
How has your life touched someone who was surprisingly distant from you?
“There are bees in every hive with inherent imperfections: they cannot navigate from the directions given by others. They fly off everywhere. They are always getting lost. They never gather much pollen. Yet, by an incongruous twist of fate, these bees can still dance directions to others. And so they occasionally return from their misguided wanderings with delirious gospel of what they have found. Good god, what they have found! It is the lost bee who finds new flowers.” –Jack Haas
What have you found by getting lost?
