Author: clfuu

Santa Lucia Day

In Sweden Santa Lucia, or Saint Lucy’s Day is welcomed in by a girl with a crown of evergreens and candles on her head. January 13 was the solstice in the old, Julian candle, so the day honoring Saint Lucy was a way of ushering in the growing light. But in Sweden you will have to wait quite a long time past December before you will see much of any light at all.

How do you find patience to wait for the light when it is nowhere to be seen?

Advent Calendar

Many families that celebrate Christmas welcome in the season with an Advent calendar that has a little window that opens on a special picture for each night of the Advent season, or which harbors a small treat to be discovered each day.

How might it change your experience of this season if you looked at each day with the expectation that it was holding some little hidden treat for you?

I Said to My Soul, be Still

“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
–T.S. Eliot, from “East Coker”

How do you still your soul when you are impatient for change?

Swinging High

When was the last time you were on a swing? Can you feel in your body the sensation of flying, of leaning back and pumping your legs until you hit the very highest arc of the swing? The rush forward and backward is a joy, but the best part is that brief suspended moment at the top of the arc, the flash of weightlessness before you inevitably come down again.

What allows you moments in which you pause, however briefly, outside the regular parameters of your life?