Teaser Tuesday - 16 August

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke says, "love..onsists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other." That is the kind of love my friend Bill offered.

From Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak - I'm re-reading this (having, at last, found my copy) and I thought I might have 'teased' it before - but apparently not - I have though quoted it on a few occasions here - lots of words to mull on and treasure.

Winter

And again, on a wintry morning, from Parker Palmer's book on vocation - Let your Life Speak:

Winter has an even greater gift to give. It comes when the sky is clear, the sun is brilliant, the trees are bare, and the first snow is yet to come. It is the gift of utter clarity. In winter, one can walk into woods that had been opaque with summer growth only a few months earlier and see the trees clearly, singly and together, and see the ground they had been rooted in. ... Until we walk boldly into the fears we most want to avoid, those fears will dominate our lives. But when we walk directly into them - protected from frostbite by the warm garb of friendship or inner discipline or spiritual guidance - we can learn what they have to teach us. Then we discover once again that the cycle of the seasons is trustworthy and life-giving, even in the most dismaying season of all.

May we all see clearly in this most demanding of all seasons.

Listening

More from Parker Palmer's book on vocation - Let your Life Speak:

Vocation does not come from a voice "out there" calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice "in here", calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God

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And while in thoughtful mood, here is Stephen Hough on Advent and Mompou:

We are dealing here with the most intense contemplation – even a metaphysical depiction of reality: the accidents have disappeared and we are left only with the substance. It is as if the person watching the fountain or hearing the bell is being evoked, his or her soul at rest in harmony with the vibration, or purified in the cleansing water.

writing about the composer's 'The Fountain and the Bell’ contrasting it with Liszt or Ravel. I need to be a lot more reflective when playing Mompou..

Vocation

Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.

from Frederick Buechner's Wishful Thinking. I'm in the midst of reading Parker Palmer's book on vocation - Let your Life Speak (if anyone reading this has my copy - I'd like it back - or at least to know where it is - I've just borrowed someone else's). He writes this:

Vocation does not come from wilfullness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about - or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.

Thought for the day

From Parker Palmer's 'Let your life speak':

We have a strange conceit in our culture that simply because we have said something, we understand what it means!